<RANT>
License servers and shrinkwrapped protection systems may be appropriate to
prevent casual copying but is definatley not a cracker deterent.
Rather they are a crackers dream, crack the system and all apps that use it
fall by your feet.
Whatever Globetrotter tries to make you beleive, there are working generic
license generators for FlexLM in circulation, that instantly enables any
application that relies on it for copy protection. It's not because they have
made a bad or inferior product, quite the opposite. Because of it's widespread
use it's the number one cracking target, and will continue to be.
The same thing is true for other popular copyprotection shemes like Safedisk
and SecuROM, used to prevent copying of CD-ROMs. As long as they are in
widespread use, so will the generic cracks be.
A license manager or other copy protection built into the Palm OS would soon
fall to the crackers and you can expect a HackMaster hack or something similar
to be put into circulation that immediatly removes the copyprotection. In
essence turning it into a waste of precious ROM.
A commercial copy protection system will be no more effective than the copy
protection bit already present in the PalmOS. It's just a waste of money.
</RANT>
Each program worthy of copy protection needs to have it's own homemade copy
protection system. It will not prevent your app from beeing cracked, there's
allways someone out there with to much time on his hands, but it will prevent
the application from falling victim to a generic crack that again allows large
scale casual copying.
In the case of Palm and other more or less closed hardware platforms
implementing a hw based copyprotection might be feasible, but probably a big
gamble. If a bug creeps in and a loophole is found a lot of investments goes
down the drain.
And besides, even the hardware system must not become to popular, or the big
priates will smell money to earn. Look at the fate of the smartcard systems
used to protect satellite boradcasts.
Regards,
Fredrik Ohrn
On Mon, 24 Jan 2000 09:43:31 -0500, you wrote:
>The recurrent threads discussing software licensing, the latest "demo
>crippling" for example, reiterate the desires of the development community
>for a mechanism of protecting their products. Has anyone considered
>investing some time into porting some of the server based licensing schemes
>available in the Windows and Unix environments and setting up a licenses
>server application on a Palm? I'm certainly no expert on the topic as my
>experience has been mostly as a developer and Unix system admin type. I've
>installed quite a number of FlexLM and proprietary servers and licenses in
>my day.
>
>I wonder if such an animal would be possible (i.e. crack resistant and
>trustworthy). If so, would Palm be interested in incorporating something
>like it into the OS so developers like myself could assume it's existence.
>
>Just thinking out loud...
>
>-- Paul
>
>PS: Maybe a note to your Windows/Mac/Unix licensing software vendor of
>choice might be a way to see if any of them see a future on the Palm?
>___________________________________________________________
>Paul A. Dugas Dugas Enterprises, LLC
>mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 1711 Indian Ridge Drive
>tel:404-932-1355 Woodstock, GA 30189-6856
>fax:770-516-4841 http://pauld.dugas.com
>
>
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--
I don't see why there's a problem with computers thinking
it's the year 1900. Computers weren't even invented in 1900.
Fredrik �hrn Chalmers University of Technology
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sweden
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