Re: [Slightly OT] Shareware donation collection
Re: [Slightly OT] Shareware donation collection
- Subject: Re: [Slightly OT] Shareware donation collection
- From: Charles Srstka <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 11:45:36 -0600
On Feb 17, 2004, at 12:36 PM, Mark Eissler wrote:
On Feb 15, 2004, at 7:09 PM, Finlay Dobbie wrote:
How would you go about "processing transactions offline"? Sounds like
a high overhead in manpower to me... :-)
Absolutely! The amount of overhead in manpower varies with a direct
relationship to the number of sales. But it is another way. ;-)
From what I've learned about esellerate so far is that they do provide
a number of options for issuing serial numbers. But the style that I'm
particular fond of is a serial that is tied to a MAC address. And I
guess the only way to implement such a scheme with esellerate would be
to use their SDK and embed payment into the application.
But I think as others have hinted here in the past, this type of
serial number is overkill in the amount of effort it takes to maintain
it. Learning to live with lost sales due to warez distributions that
include serial numbers is just a cost of doing business. Or is it?
The problem with tying a serial to a MAC address is that it limits your
customers' use of the product. For example, what if your customer has
two machines, a desktop and a laptop, and wants to use your program on
both? What if your customer upgrades to a new Mac and sells his old
one? What if a university computer lab has bought your utility and
wants a site license
Yeah, I know some people restrict software licenses to one copy per
machine. But I personally don't see the point. If the same user owns
two machines, why shouldn't he be able to use the utility he paid for
to solve problems on both of them? It may stop people from just
uploading their serial to the warez sites, but no one ever does that
anyway. What they do is decompile your code and read the assembler, and
figure out your serial algorithm. If your code is specific to one MAC
address, they won't be able to just generate a serial and post it,
sure, but there's nothing stopping them from just writing a serial
generator for your app and posting that.
Basically, I don't bother with stuff like this. The customer comes
first; anything that would make piracy more difficult at the expense of
the customer, I'm not sure is worth it.
Charles
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