Re: [Slightly OT] Shareware donation collection
Re: [Slightly OT] Shareware donation collection
- Subject: Re: [Slightly OT] Shareware donation collection
- From: "M. Uli Kusterer" <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2004 18:25:29 +0100
At 10:25 Uhr -0600 22.02.2004, Charles Srstka wrote:
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.
Even worse: What of your users when your company goes out of
business? If the app is keyed to the MAC address and their Ethernet
card dies, they'll be unable to use their legitimately bought
application anymore.
Or what if you don't want to support older versions of your
applications anymore and switch to a new registration scheme? If the
app phones home every week or so, it'll suddenly refuse running. I'm
not sure that's the right way to get your users to upgrade.
Of course, if the app only phones home upon installation, these
aren't that bad, but, looking at the old PowerMac 7200 I have here
hooked up to my scanner, I'd really be annoyed if any of the old
applications installed on it insisted on phoning home. Heck, that
machine isn't even connected to the net...
I agree that most shareware developers are probably more concerned
with staying in business right now and don't really care what happens
with theyir app in a couple of years, but considering that it'll take
the average cracker exactly the time it takes to step through your
application once at startup in a debugger and to then make a NO-OP
out of the call to whatever function checks the S/N, I really don't
see a point in going overboard with such protection schemes.
Just don't store registration info in the Preferences file so casual
pirates can't just delete the prefs every 30 days to get an unlimited
license, and you'll have as much protection as makes sense. Everyone
who goes to much more effort than that, probably sees it as a
challenge and would crack your elaborate scheme anyway, and making
life a misery for your paying customers will cause much more damage
than those crackers can, I'd suppose.
And AFAIK most people who use cracked software are the ones who
wouldn't have bought it in the first place, and merely use it because
it's so easy to get a cracked version. So, that doesn't cost you
sales, but rather broadens your installed base. Which could be
useful, because maybe when such people found a company, they want to
play it safe and buy a license of *your* program instead of a
competitor's, because they are already acquainted with it.
But then again, I'm a code-monkey, not the sales department. Maybe
someone has hard facts contradicting my limited experience...
--
Cheers,
M. Uli Kusterer
------------------------------------------------------------
"The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere..."
http://www.zathras.de
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