OT: copy protection / licensing for Mac?

Eric Chatonet eric.chatonet at sosmartsoftware.com
Tue Aug 12 11:17:57 EDT 2008


Bonjour Tiemo,

As many have said it, nobody will share his own protection scheme.
Neither me :-)

Hacking is a sensible thing but only for commercial large apps or  
very expensive ones:
I don't know but it's probably not your case.

Actually, the main problem is no longer which protection scheme to  
use (even if it stays something you *must* think of) but which  
business model to set up.
In the current market, with all free (open source) software, you  
probably will take advantage with thinking of a free version where  
one single but important feature will be disabled.
The goal is to flood the market then to give users the incentive to  
get  the payed version.
Now to protect the payed version, it's another thing...
Just know that a Rev standalone is not the best protected software ;-)

Le 8 août 08 à 10:43, Tiemo Hollmann TB a écrit :

> Hello,
>
> this topic is already discussed a few times, but I didn't found any
> "satisfying" answers in the archives.
>
> I am looking for a copy protection / or licensing system with a  
> minimum on
> handling / trouble for me which gives a good protection for the  
> average
> user. No protection against cracks is required, because the  
> quantity of my
> publication is too low to be in interest for hackers. I want to  
> build a
> hybrid CD for Mac and Win. Up to now I used ProtectDisc (a german  
> system)
> which is implemented in my runtime exe, so that my app can be run  
> only with
> the original CD (which is ok, because my apps are heavy video apps,  
> where
> the videos always stay on CD. This is a good solution for me,  
> because I
> don't have any maintenance as supplying a licensing server with  
> serial and
> all this activation stuff. BUT this technique is only available for  
> Win ( as
> my CD factory tells me, because the Mac community is "so small").  
> So that
> the Mac part of my hybrid CD is unsecured and can be copied.
>
> I was already thinking of programming a kind of a "minimum licensing"
> function for the Mac part, as asking any hardware information from the
> system, generating a licence key for this number, which I had to  
> pass to the
> customer. But this would just be a very small obstacle, because any  
> user
> could ask for the licence key, because the users can buy my product in
> standard bookshops as amazon, where I don't have any control, if  
> they bought
> a official copy or if they copied it from a friend.
>
> What are your experiences, which systems do you use for  
> protection / easy
> handling of licensing? Is there at all any copy protection which  
> works for
> both sides of hybrid CDs?
>
> Thanks for sharing your experiences
>
> Tiemo




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