Boring but important - selling a download product for Windows

[Richmond Mathewson]

Here's Richmond, the retro, reactionary pain in the b., and the way he 
sells software:

First caveat: I do not sell my software in large quantities (anyone for 
Sanskrit?).

Having "played" with the demo a potential customer has to contact me, 
and then
put the fee into my PayPal account.

The demo is downloadable from my website.

Once I see the fee I run off a standalone (for whatever platform they 
request) with a
clear label on the front card with their name, title and so on, upload 
it to my Dropbox
account and send them the link.

This normally involves 15-30 minutes of my time.

So: no code-signing, no "nuffin". Crude, but it works.

Richmond.

On 1/21/17 9:43 pm, Graham Samuel via use-livecode wrote:
> Sorry to witter on after I’ve asked this list a lot about code signing etc so often. The excellent help I’ve had has enabled me to sign both the app I want to distribute and its installer - in fact I’ve done this twice, once for the Mac version of this app and once for the Windows version.
>
> The intention is to sell the product by offering a download from a web site, using FastSpring for the payments, and incorporating Jacque Gay’s Zygodact to provide unique activation keys.
>
> All this works fine, except for the Windows download, where Norton, Chrome and even Windows 7 all attempt to prevent either the download or the execution of the installer. Again with advice from this list, I know where some of the problems lie (though not the one with Windows, which reports the installer as having an ‘unknown publisher’ but later displays the publisher provided during the code signing!).
>
> My question is, what do other people do about this? If you generate a new desktop program for Windows and try to sell it as a download, how can you strip away all this nonsense for the average purchaser? So far all I can think of doing is to issue a warning on the web site that explains what do do if Norton ‘quarantines’ the program. Even this does not cover all the obstacles in the poor purchaser’s way.
>
> Doesn’t this affect everyone trying to offer a new executable download?
>
> [noise of grinding teeth…]
>
> TIA for any further views.
>
> Graham
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