As a programmer (personal and for business) I've followed the cracking "scene" for years.
As stated here there is NOTHING you can do to stop someone from stealing your program. Well, there is one thing... make it such a crappy program that no one wants it. My employer as been through the dongle, machine specific key pair, etc. and none work 100% and most frustrate the users. I've personally purchased two pieces of software that require activation over the internet (no other way) where the companies have gone out of business. That immediately ends the life of the software that I paid for. One of them required a phone home every 15 minutes! Back in the days when the only way to distribute your shareware was through shareware disk collections, BBS and Compuserve, I was a member of the Association of Shareware Professionals (ASP BBS#99.) The main requirement for software distributed with the ASP label was that Trial Version = Paid for version. An author was limited as to how man keypress or button clicks it took to get into the program, nag screens, etc. The trial version had to be fully functional, no limits on file sizes, database entries or time/use limits. The paid for version could offer EXTRA features over and above the functionality of the program. A very good example of a current shareware program that follows this is TotalCommander by Christian Ghisler. It's a dual window file manager for Windows similar to Norton Commander, Stereo Shell and many others. The only "protection" is that it pops up three buttons labeled 1, 2 and 3 at launch and a message tells you which button to push. I bought the program about six or seven years ago and was registration number 23,808. It sells for about $35 then and now. All upgrades are free for life and my key/serial works for all of them. Who knows how many registrations he's sold since then. My preference is for a program that's activated by entering a serial number or dropping in a key file. That number/key file should work with at least THAT version of the program forever on any computer. RealBasic used to be that way. I'm not sure that it still does now that they've gone to a subscription system. I have a new Windows box and both my Mac and Win Professional subscriptions have expired (I sent an email to sales at realsoftware that I'm waiting on an answer for before I renew.) Tomorrow I'm going to try to install RB2006 R2 on this new box and see if my license will still work. If it doesn't I have some heavy thinking to do about the future of RB as my programming environment. On 9/15/06, Trausti Thor Johannsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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.
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