Michael: The answer, as always, is "it depends".
How much protection do you really need? Are your potential customers really going to try to do you in, given that if they do steal it, what will they do for training, support, etc? I suspect most crack sites will ignore a vertical market app that doesn't have widepread appeal. I wrote an VFP app for a client a few years ago to manage all aspects of small private training schools. We thought that it had some potential for sales to other schools, so I wrote a licensing scheme for it. The trial version expired after a given period (that we could set when we shipped the trial, of we wanted). Various features of the system were unlocked by the key sent to registered users. As it turned out, we had a lot of interest and sent out a lot of demos. But we didn't really market it seriously, so we didn't sell any. However, the original client still runs the app to this day. My scheme may be acceptable for you ( I would have to look into the details some more - it has been a while since I looked at the code), but if a commercial package is not too expensive, given your expected revenue, that would likely be a better solution. In our case, we really had no excess cash to throw around. If we had sold some copies, I probably would have changed the system, mainly to protect against existing clients who had a legit copy from making copies to run at other sites, or to prevent them from unlocking features that they hadn't paid for. We can pursue this offline, if you wish. Larry At 02:17 PM 2007-04-03 -0400, you wrote: >How hard is it to stick in some mechanism whereby they plug in a license >key you provide (or leave blank for the 'trial' version)? > >tia, >--Michael > >-- >Michael J. Babcock, MCP >MB Software Solutions, LLC >http://mbsoftwaresolutions.com >http://fabmate.com >"Work smarter, not harder, with MBSS custom software solutions!" > > > [excessive quoting removed by server] _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
