Re: [now OT] Licensing/Implementing in Cocoa/Obj-C - Interest in product?
Re: [now OT] Licensing/Implementing in Cocoa/Obj-C - Interest in product?
- Subject: Re: [now OT] Licensing/Implementing in Cocoa/Obj-C - Interest in product?
- From: mathew <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 10 Apr 2004 14:31:42 -0400
On Apr 7, 2004, at 01:21, j o a r wrote:
>
While that sounds nice, I don't think it matters much as most apps are
>
pirated either via a distribution of the serial number (or in this case
>
licence file), or by patching the application to not even perform the
>
license check.
Right.
Look at Cubase. It's pirated all the time, even though it uses a
hardware dongle which obviously can't be duplicated.
You will never stop the dishonest people from pirating your product.
Never. Give up that fantasy right now.
The only purpose of copy protection is to keep the *basically honest*
people from casually copying the program (or allowing it to be copied
by using it on a shared machine), and to get around the problem of
people being too lazy to register in the first place.
Public key cryptography is massive overkill. All you need is an MD5
hash of the customer's information and some moderately well hidden
secret bytes. If you want to prevent key sharing or generation by third
parties, have your application call back to a web site when the key is
entered to verify that it's one you issued and that you haven't revoked
it for overuse. (See Ambrosia's articles on this.)
Trying to prevent a debugger from running will make the code more
complex and fragile, and hence less desirable for people to register.
It'll also make it harder for people to provide useful bug reports.
Final comment: Place yourself at the right point on the price/number of
registrations curve. Look at how much comparable products sell for. Be
realistic and canvass opinions from other developers. I'm sure we can
all come up with examples of totally unrealistic shareware pricing...
mathew
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