Re: [Slightly OT] Shareware donation collection
Re: [Slightly OT] Shareware donation collection
- Subject: Re: [Slightly OT] Shareware donation collection
- From: Mark Eissler <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2004 10:43:32 -0500
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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