> As Aaron's experience demonstrates, you can only slow down the crackers > a little. The factors that make the most difference in whether or not > people buy your software are 1) the quality of the software, and 2) the > quality of the people who are interested in obtaining your software. > Criminally minded people will perform criminal acts no matter what you > do to protect your software. (Unless your software somehow changes the > way they think, in which case it would make excellent shareware.)
actually, since the paper was written - we have made some advancements with software/applications protection/distribution. and, it seems to be working. while having a full demo and using an unlock code isn't going to protect your application from being pirated, the notion of using a "seperate" application build for demo + full version is also just as bad. once they get the full version, they'll just distribute it. our applications have "extra" functionality available upon purchase, and, we ship this functionality in an additional resource/database file (its actually real code) which is encrypted/encoded based on their hotsync username/other factors. the database actually contains a code resource :) if it doesn't decrypt right, no code for the user :P with our lemmings demo, we ship additional level packs. these level packs are encrypted in a similar manner, allowing them not to be shared between users. the lemmings demo has been out for over a year now, and, i am yet to find the level packs on pirate sites. maybe i am not looking hard enough, but, big deal :) its only software isn't it? :) if your curious/bored like i was - you implement security/piracy systems to amuse yourself. in some cases it'll pay off - in others, it wont. it all depends on what the demand for the "crack" is. liberty (gameboy emulator) was highly demanded in the pirate circles - hence, pirates worked day and night to figure out how to generate the data files. the amusing fact was that the crack application they wrote had a much better user interface than our datafile generation *g* maybe lemmings isn't demanded enough? :) -- Aaron Ardiri CEO - CTO Mobile Wizardry http://www.mobilewizardry.com/ -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
