Requirements for a Student Version of Specman/IES-XL?

Allow me to interrupt my blogging on MarCom and DAC to pose a question inspired by the back-to-school season:

You may recall a question was posted to Mike Stellfox back in February about the availability of a limited, student version of Specman and IES-XL for the student's personal computer (vs. the full Specman/IES-XLs our University program partners are licensed to run on official school machines).  Unfortunately, Cadence does not support such "personal" editions of Specman/IES-XL today.

However, since this initial post there have been enough follow-on queries about it to build internal interest in the idea.  Boosted by the energy of the back-to-school season, this concept's champions have been inspired to take the logical next step and collect requirements for such an animal.  (Yes, funding the implementation of this in such this challenging economic environment is a whole other issue.  But it can't hurt to take the baby step of outlining requirements, right?)  While my colleagues and I have some ideas here, we welcome the community to:

• Point us to some best practices and precedents (beyond the venerable student versions of Matlab and SPSS which many of us are already familiar with)

• Suggest what limitations (either in features and/or capacity) are "reasonable".  (Obviously we are concerned that if the student version is too capable, pirates could use it for real work and cannibalize sales.  That said, students do some amazing projects these days, so we are also concerned about being overly constraining as well.)

• Confirm that we could limit the platform to Linux only, based on the theory that any serious student of engineering will have access to and/or have made their own Linux setup.

Please post your ideas and thoughts below, or contact me offline.

Joe Hupcey III