Until now, commercial software has generally been based around the traditional business model of selling a product directly to the user. Piracy is seen as a threat to direct sales, and many commercial publishers have responded to this with various kinds of DRM, but are there alternatives to the model which could make piracy irrelevant? Tzer2 takes a look at some candidates...

"There has been a lot of discussion on All About Symbian's comments threads recently about DRM, piracy and commercial software.

To get a bit of perspective on the situation, this article will avoid discussing piracy and DRM directly. Instead, we're going to concentrate on alternatives to the traditional commercial software business model. At the moment commercial software is mostly sold the same way things like books or apples or cars are, you give the makers some money and they give you the product. But how else could commercial software production be funded?

In short, are any of the following business models viable for software? If they're not viable, is there really any alternative to the current model of selling software directly?"

Read on