An announcement was made by Fomine Software today, saying that Winpopup LAN Messenger, its flagship product, will no longer use the software activation technique to combat end-user piracy, and abandon the time-based expiration of the freely downloadable evaluation version by offering evaluation users three free licenses for Winpopup LAN Messenger.

    Activation seemed a great idea at the time as it promised to limit casual piracy by disallowing running additional copies of software products without proper licensing. Fomine Software decided to abandon software activation altogether effective immediately, After analyzing feedback as well as privacy, security and network accessibility concerns from its customers.

    Fomine Software would like to thank all customers for their continuous support and feedback that made it possible to maintain and improve Winpopup LAN Messenger.

    Fomine Software strongly believes in unlimited, un-crippled software distributed on try-before-you-buy basis. Most try-before-you-buy products come as feature-locked, crippled, time-limited or nag-screened demo versions. The controversy of locking or crippling the product's features is obvious, as the users have no chance to test the features they need, which challenges the whole idea of the evaluation version. A better compromise seems to be the idea of locking the free demo version after a certain number of days or uses, only till you think about the time invested by the customer in evaluating the product.

    Fomine Software opted to reward its customers for downloading and evaluating their software instead of charging for it. Effective immediately, every customer who downloads Winpopup LAN Messenger gets three free licenses for the product. The free licenses effectively allow connecting up to three users on the same local area network. Unlike competitors, Fomine Software allows both private and commercial use of the free licenses. Need more than three licenses? Just pay for the rest of the pack. If your network has five users, you only have to pay for two additional licenses, as the first three come free.

    The new evaluation policy employed by Fomine Software allows using the freely available Winpopup LAN Messenger for private or commercial use on a local area network for unlimited time while not limiting its features in any way. You are free to download and use Winpopup LAN Messenger on your network with up to three instant messaging clients. Additional user licenses are readily available if you need more than three users communicate over the LAN.