Do you always consider your potential clients to be criminals?
Copying code without a license is illegal. I'd say, don't
do business with criminals. Besides, if they really are
criminals, they probably have the means and the will to crack
whatever you cook up. Compiled code can be decompiled. License
keys can be broken.
Code based licensing is a lot easier to manage than trust, catch and legal.
I used to work for a company that sold software with a price tags
up to several millions of dollars. And the customers could get
the source code for free as well. We never had a problem that
code was copied illegally. But then, we didn't deal with the
maffia.
Abigail | [reply] |
The problem is that the product has a number of different user types. The most interesting one of these is the one that pays loads and they are not worried about them at all. It's the download it off of the web and sort it out yourself type that is the concern.
--
Steve Marvell
| [reply] |
So, why put in on a website in the first place?
Abigail
| [reply] |
Let me get this straight - you want to enforce whether or not I have installed your libraries on two front-end servers vs. one. What if they're a pool serving the same website? What if I run more than one website on the same server? How do you license that?!? More importantly, even with protection of library and the like, how do you enforce that?
Also, you're talking about compiling and the like. Well, that has never stopped consulting firms from giving their consultants free copies of Windows 2000 or Visual Studio, Professional Edition. (I know several people who have received both for free.) Now, those people can never call up Microsoft and receive support for those products, nor can they receive free or reduced-price updates. (They shouldn't be able to receive bugfixes, but Microsoft apparently lets bootleg copies be patched.) How are you going to do better than Microsoft in the licensing arena?
If you're not going to trust your client to some minimal degree, don't do business with them. I mean, they might not pay you and then you'd be up a smelly creek without a paddle, wouldn't you?
------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age. Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement. Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified. | [reply] |
