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: Sun, 22 Feb 2004 10:25:32 -0600
Here's another problem I can see with having software phone home: What
happens if your web host goes down for a while? Bingo, all your
customers will immediately be unable to use your product, and your
support e-mail box will get flooded.
Charles
On Feb 20, 2004, at 9:43 AM, Mark Eissler wrote:
Josh brings up a really good point: a legitimate user would have no
problem contacting the developer/vendor if they run into issues with
the serial number. A pirate user would have a lot of....courage....to
call up the vendor and complain. And if they do it, well kudos to
them, they deserve an A for having the guts.
-mark
On Feb 19, 2004, at 5:32 PM, Josh Ferguson wrote:
Charles,
I agree with you to a certain extent. eSellerate offers a feature
like this called Product Activation, where a specific serial number
is tied to a machine ID (a hash of several unique identifiers, like
machine serial number, hard drive SN, MAC address and I don't know
what else). When a publisher decides that they want to use Product
Activation for their product, they can specify any number of
activations for each serial number. For example, with FileStorm, we
allow three activations. If someone emails in and says they want
their activation limit reset, we will typically do so without any
hassle (if you use eSellerate, then you as the publisher have
complete control over this). Most customers never have an issue, and
we've had literally thousands of failed activation attempts. Product
Activation, if set up correctly, is a very effective deterrent for
casual piracy. The people who are more than casual pirates probably
wouldn't buy your software anyway, so trying to stop them isn't
economical. I'm a firm believer that we have not lost any sales
because of this feature, and I know for a fact that we have blocked
thousands of illegitimate registration attempts.
Josh Ferguson
-----Original Message-----
From: email@hidden
[mailto:email@hidden]On Behalf Of Charles Srstka
Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2004 11:46 AM
To: Mark Eissler
Cc: CocoaDev List; Mike Brinkman; Finlay Dobbie
Subject: Re: [Slightly OT] Shareware donation collection
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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Mark Eissler, email@hidden
Mixtur Interactive, Inc.
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