You will never be able to stop people from cracking your software. Heck,
there have even been times when I had to resort to doing my own cracking
to use a 'time limited' or some sort of 'shareware internet registration'
to be able to use the full version. The long and short of it is as long
as there is software people want to use and it's more cost effective to
spend hours downloading (or, heaven forbid, cracking yourself) people
will find a way to crack it. If you don't want it cracked (very fast
that is) you will have to devote considerable resources to finding a way
to make it uncrackable as long as possible (i.e. long enough for you to
make a profit off of it). Remember there are high school and college
students that have many free hours to spend doing this sort of thing, and
also working people, but just with not as much free time.
In my opinion,
Q. Is downloading full versions of cracked software wrong?
A. Probably.
Q. Is downloading full (trial) versions of software from the internet or
CD provided by the author/company then cracking it yourself wrong?
A. No. If a person/company is too lazy or stupid to think through their
copy protection ahead of time they are just looking for trouble. And
yes, it would be foolish to use the same scheme on multiple peices of
software to better code reuse (like M$ Office, OS, Bookshelf, Developer
studio.......)
For all you software engineers out there like me. At least perform a
checksum on your code before you allow the OS (Palm or otherwise) to
execute it to stop the inexperienced hacker from NOPing or changing BEQs
to BNEs. (and yes, I know it is a little difficult to do this when not
in an embedded system, using someone elses OS, but if you don't, be
prepared for many crackers of all ages to use you software in a matter of
minutes, hours or days)
Just my thoughts on the subject matter.
<-------------------------------->
Ryan C. Minnig
Software Engineer
