Standalone deployment

[Scott Kane]

Marty,

> I'm getting ready to deploy my first serious Rev application and I'm 
> trying to decide on how to deploy/sell it. Should I have a 
> purchase-only 
> scenario, using a service such as Kagi (I've also set up a number of 
> Miva stores) or, should I have some kind of crippled version that 
> requires the presence of some kind of license stack for full 
> functionality? Or??? Anyone had any experiece with trying different 
> methods and found one that seemed to improve sales? I want something 
> streamlined and reasonably fraud-resistant. It won't be a 
> real expensive 
> program - probably $40-50 range.
> 
> Any thoughs are appreciated,

I'm the moderator of comp.software.shareware.*
The group comp.software.shareware.authors is a good
place to get some answers to this.  As is AISIP 
(http://www.aisip.com  only $29.99 a year) or the
ASP (http://www.aspshareware.org  which is dearer
at $99 a year).  I was Vice President and a Board
Director several years ago - but I favour AISIP now
because it is extremely pleasant (atmosphere) and
is moderated by a very nice lady.  

There are several licensing models available.  For
my Borland Delphi software I use Armadillo 
(http://www.siliconrealms.com) or ASProtect
(http://www.asprotect.com )  Neither of these tools
will work with Rev and of course they are Windows
only tools.  The design of compiled stack in Rev
leaves a lot of information in ASCII text in the executable
(on Windows anyway) which make hacking rather obvious (sadly).
I personally would recommend reduced functionality for the
demo version (it would be nice if Rev did conditional compiles)
coupled with a 30 day time limit.  Both can be overcome unless
you do the crippling so that there are no options available in
the compiled version of your stack - a separate version of your
software in other words.  

One day I'll get Lazarus running on OSX and will be able to
translate my Object Pascal to library files that can be
called on OSX, Windows and *nix - but that won't happen anytime
soon as configuring Lazarus on OSX is a nightmare I have not
concluded.  <g>

Scott