For me "activation" is something you do once. It usually requires an online connection these days, but that's not too much a problem if you only need to do it once: You move the storage appliance to a less secure environment with internet connectivity, activate, disconnect and move it back.

But it looks like DSS-lite wants to check your license every time it boots and perhaps continuously. But I don't want to give my home storage server permanent internet connectivity and I don't want to loose my data, because open-e's validation server isn't available "enterprise class" (difficult if you don't make money on the service).

I also believe there is a difference between "online activation" and "usage tracking".

I've used the ISO demo in the past and I really liked product. But since the "home" version was discontinued (wasn't iSCSI and NAS either) and the entry level €700 was a bit too expensive to my taste I had basically gone back to using CentOS 5.1 and the Berlios iSCSI TGT with Samba to do the job, even though it's a lot more hassle to "administer" on a family father time budget.

When this offer came out I thought "It's Christmas again!", but the risk of loosing your data after January 31st, because the hardware changed too much or because the connectivity to the verification service is lost, is simply too big to offset the ease of administration.

Why don't you do a €99 version without the online-dongle and add a €149 version for 4TB?

I tend to convert my "game stations" into home servers once they grow older and have their place ursurped by newer hardware. That's a gradual process and involves components (nics, disks, cpus even motherboards) moving individually rather than as a whole. And as the hardware ages, chances of it failing increases. Not a really problem, usually with Linux (much more so with Windows). But when you tie licenses to hardware I might as well be using Windows and StarWind.

BTW. Versions that work with 512MB or even 256MB would be nice, too.