Bob Kodadek wrote: > 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.
Then all the rest of their licensed software (that was tied to another name) would no longer work. People don't want to go changing their hotsync user name to something different for every different app they run and do it every time they run an app. In fact, most people probably don't know how. > 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? Sure, they could do that. But if you have 5 applications that you like to use regularly, how convenient is it to carry around 5 Palm devices with you all the time? It's much more convenient to just pay the license fees properly and carry around one device with all the software on it. In other words, no user is really going to spend $20.00 (plus shipping) on some old used Palm device when they could just buy your software for $20 or $30 or $50. Actually, both these schemes that you describe could in fact be done, and maybe someone somewhere actually does them. But that does not change the fact that there are people out there making a fair amount of money selling Palm software. Yes, piracy can happen, but there is not a foolproof way to stop it. (Even if there were a hardware serial number, it's easy enough to get a disassembler, find the code that checks it, and put a JMP instruction at the beginning of that block of code to bypass it. Doing that is certainly much easier than buying a large quantity of devices on eBay.) The fact is, from a business point of view, piracy is a reality, but it's only a small percentage if you take some precautions. In fact, I think you have to ask yourself if you lock the license to the hardware, will the support costs of issuing new keys (when someone upgrades to a newer device) outweigh the advantage of reduced piracy? It might. - Logan -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
