Re: protecting time-limited demos
Re: protecting time-limited demos
- Subject: Re: protecting time-limited demos
- From: David Remahl <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2003 19:00:59 +0200
On torsdag, apr 17, 2003, at 18:40 Europe/Stockholm, Ron Phillips wrote:
How does one protect a time-limited demo? I've seen discussions here
about protecting licensed software but not demos. I am far from a
licensing guru (hence the problem) but I see various schemes:
1) Somehow the time (or usage count) is hidden on the hard drive (?) -
best I can guess. This solution is protected better than the
Presidential football codes.
2) The demo customer gets a free trial license after install. How
does that work?
I'm not looking for a solution "on the cheap." I'm willing to
purchase, within reason, whatever solution or expertise that will
solve this problem. I've looked at some postings here about modifying
a file size in the bundle to keep up with launch counts. But all you
need to do to defeat this is re-install the app. (I visualize keeping
the .sit file on the desktop and re-installing after the demo lapses.)
If this is not the forum for this, could some kind soul point me to
the place that is. I've been to the end of the internet and have
found nothing.
Thanks in advance,
Ron
email@hidden
Both of your solutions are viable. For example OmniGroup and many other
companies in the enterprise business issue expiring keys. The
expiration is built into the license key algorithm.
What you should not do, is to modify a file inside of your bundle. You
must anticipate that a user may run your application without write
permissions to files in your application bundle. That can happen for
example if a non-admin uses the program, or if it resides on a network
volume.
There are several licensing solutions for sale for Cocoa. They
generally cost a lot of money, though. One example is The Licenser Kit
from Stone Design:
<
http://kumo.swcp.com/stonedesign-bin/shop.pl/page=products.htm>
/ Sincerely, David Remahl
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