Well, I have searched this forum, the PalmOne site, Appforge, and everything I can find on the internet, and no one has ever found a solution to protecting software apps on Palm devices. I've seen lots of explanations and whimsy, but nothing real. Simply put, if there is no ROM serial number, or unique (Read Only) ID stored in the hardware, then you are screwed and that's all there is to it. When copy protection is an absolute necessity for anyone developing programs in today's world, why doesn't Palm include a Flash Eprom or ROM chip with a unique serial number? Who wants to waste their time developing products for a device when the manufacturer doesn't care what happens to the developer.
Now, anyone in the world can develop some scheme based on the HotSync user name, but that is completely worthless. It's not a matter of just a few people getting your program for free. Anyone can get one copy of your program with a working password and then upload the contents of the BackUp folder from the Palm Desktop for that username, onto the internet and the whole world has your program the next day. All they need to do is supply that user name. They could buy Palms on Ebay for $20.00 and resell the entire Palm with your program and that user name. And, they could sell hundreds and hundreds of them and no one would be the wiser. Don't you think that your application is worth putting onto a $20.00 Palm just to have it? I'll bet you do! The developer is the one who suffers here. No one else. It doesn't hurt the manufacturer of the Palm device one bit. In fact, it helps to sell more Palms because there is plentiful, un-protected software available for free. There are no dongles available for a Palm device, no copy proctection schemes that work. You cannot hide anything in the programs's Preferences, because a HotSync creates a database file of those preferences and stores it the the BackUp folder! I've been programming for about 20 years now, started in machine language and have seen and done it all since then. I began working with PalmOS last year and feel that, unless you are doing it for a hobby, it is a wasted effort. You can have all the hash routines and randomly generated serial numbers that you want. When you can simply HotSync the files located in the BackUp folder over to another machine with the same user name, nothing that you do can work. So, my real question is, why isn't everyone demanding that the hardware manufacturer incorporates a unique serial number, or unique ID of some type, that is Read Only on every device? One extra 25 cent chip on every device, that's all it would take. Bob -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
