Well, I'm not going to just ignore a good key system. I'd like to do something a bit better than add a key to the registry... Any suggestions here besides "just ignore it and hand your software out," would be great.
Thanks, Tyler Littlefield Web: tysdomain.com email: [email protected] My programs don't have bugs, they're called randomly added features. ----- Original Message ----- From: Thomas Hruska To: [email protected] Sent: Saturday, May 09, 2009 4:30 PM Subject: Re: [c-prog] software marketing questions Tyler Littlefield wrote: > Hello, > I hope this isn't to off-topic. > I have a couple questions regarding software marketing, as a lot of you are familiar with it, I'm assuming. > I hope to have a program ready for distribution in a month or so, and was wondering about how marketing should work. Do I need to go through any legalities in the US to distribute and be clear of a lot of problems? I can write up a wordy licence agreement, I believe I have a couple laying around, currently. How hard would it be to spread the word, and get things set up. Also, I think I'm going to need to set up a business class paypal account so that I can deal with credit card charges and that. I'll need to find some way of distributing authorization codes automatically to new customers, which brings me to another question. I need to write some sort of authentication mechenism so that people can't just give their key out to others and they get the programs free. Any good thoughts on how this can be done? I'm thinking of making debugging really hard (throwing in a check to see if a debugger is present and killing the program if it is, optomizing, removing frame pointers), which will help a lot on cracking. Does anyone else have any other solutions for prevention and dealing with user authentication so that I can keep 1 copy of the key from distributing its self to 50 different people? > > Thanks, > Tyler Littlefield > Web: tysdomain.com > email: [email protected] > My programs don't have bugs, they're called randomly added features. I refer you to the Spore disaster for introducing "draconian DRM". People who plan on pirating software will pirate regardless of how bad the procedures are that you put in place. You are wasting your time here. If your product ever has to contact your website (e.g. updates), then you simply check the serial at that time and say, "Hey! This is a pirated serial number. The guy who wrote this is hungry and needs food on his table. Here's a link to pay for your copy... Your conscience will be clear and the author will be full for a change." Of course, you could look at it this way: If your software is good, people will buy it. If a thousand people pirate the software and a thousand people buy it, then that is better than everyone pirating it and no one buying because of horribly implemented DRM. Basically, what I'm trying to say is: Make purchasing the software really, really easy and get people hooked on it early on. If someone pirates the software, then find ways to gnaw on their conscience without closing the program/etc. Guilt them into buying it. And don't hold it against them when they eventually do. Additionally, you can rest easier at night because your brain isn't being scrambled with having to thunk about weird assembler opcodes (pun intended). AND you get your product out the door much more quickly. Which means money sooner than later. -- Thomas Hruska CubicleSoft President Ph: 517-803-4197 *NEW* MyTaskFocus 1.1 Get on task. Stay on task. http://www.CubicleSoft.com/MyTaskFocus/ [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
