I can only speak from the consumer side of things, but here's my general
feelings on it:
Don't sweat it too much. Seriously. If someone appreciates a product,
they'll buy it if they can. If you focus on making an application
uncrackable, two things are likely to happen. 1, you'll likely fail at
it, and 2, your actual product will suffer. If you have someone else
focusing on just that part of it, then you might get it to work, but I
doubt it since billion dollar firms have rarely succeeded in that sort
of endeavor. Key? Pfft. Time limit? Riiiight. Network authentication?
Irritating to paying customers and probably susceptible to a man in the
middle attack. Dongle? Shoots down the whole download-buy-use flow,
irritating, and cracked by several means of spoofing or downright
patching of your binary.
Should you never update your protection scheme? No, that'd be sort of
silly, but I think it's best kept fairly casual. Remember, you're
developing a product, and the only people you're likely to frustrate
with extra layers of anti-crackery will be your customers. For instance,
when I buy a new game, the first thing I do is patch it and get a crack
for it. Why? Because the copy protection hinders the product, and often
screws with my computer's feng shui.
As for the Windows sales, I hate to say it, but I think Mac people are
more likely to just up and buy something. First off, they had enough
money to get a Mac, and second they're not used to a lot of freeware and
shareware. Windows people are often running on junk machines with copies
of Windows they bought from a kid in Belize, or some other nonsense, and
the garbage soaked world of freeware has twisted something inside of
them over the years. I may be biased here, since I repair and setup
computers for a living, but my experience has been that Mac users are
crazy, but honest, while Windows users lie to themselves, and me,
constantly, at least in regards to the computer. I could go on about the
divergent philosophies there, but I'll hold off for now.
In any case, unless the bandwidth costs are weighty, I wouldn't
personally lose any sleep over it. Most people have no idea what the
hell a crack is, or where to get it, and if they do stumble onto it
there's a very good chance they'll just end up with a virus installed by
the page. And, they weren't likely to buy your stuff anyway, so at least
this way they might suggest it to someone they know.
Just my two cents.
-Fargo
Trausti Thor Johannsson wrote:
Hello,
I make a genealogy application, and I was just googling around for it,
and seeing if any blogs where actually talking about it. I have spent
a lot of time on this app, and of course money and such (just like all
of you). I just found a crack for my app that removes the 30 day limit.
Now I know that one can do a lot to copy protect the app, I choose one
way to do it, so my copy protection scheme is not to difficult to
crack, I want to spend my time on making sure that my app is the
fastest genealogy app out there, not spend my time on making the copy
protection more complicated than my app it self.
So you people with the experience, do people go around searching for
hacks and cracks and then use the app, or is this a sub set of people
that would never buy the app anyway.
This hack is windows only as far as I can find out. And that is what
troubles me, after I released my application in many languages, I
revived the windows build of it. And I am getting almost 50%
downloads of Windows vs Mac OS X 50%, and these are thousands of
downloads. It is quite close call. But I have not a single sale for
windows, not one sale. All the sales I am getting are Mac OS X (as
far as I know).
What do you people do when you find your app on a sleazy site ? Do
you re-write the copy protection, only to have it cracked again a few
days later ? Or isn't this just a very clear sign of stop developing
the Windows application ?
And if you rewrite the copy protection, doesn't that mean sending out
new serial numbers to all your users, and having extra support for
weeks ? or should I just continue what I do and just look at this
like a free advertisement ?
Best regards,
Trausti Thor
Studlar Software
http://www.studlar.net
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