Re: Registration Solution

On Fri, 20 Apr 2007 09:40:51 +0100, Peter Morris <support@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

01: Once installed your software will work for 30 days without registering, this should be long enough for servers to come back up if they are down
immediately after you purchase your product.

But due-diligence worries aren't about what happens "immediately", it's what might happen at some indeterminate point in the future - What if those activation servers don't ever come back up?

If a simple uninstall + reinstall of *Delphi* gives you another X days usage - this would hardly constitute a major obstacle to the piracy that the Activation process is supposed to be preventing.

OTOH, would you pay lots of money for the sources of an application written in Delphi, if the ongoing maintenance /might/ require you nuke your developers' C partitions every X days?
Or /might/ leave you open to lawsuits (for hacking the IDE) from whoever had picked up the IP rights to Delphi but declined to accept any obligation to previous purchasers?
Or /might/ impose a $100K per seat re-activation charge? - "How can you Delphi developers possibly object? That's much less than it has cost us to set up all the servers and infrastructure necessary to provide this re-activation service for your (obsolete) product".

BTW I'm not suggesting that any of this /will/ ever come to pass, but equally nothing can /guarantee/ that it won't. To repeat my main point: "would you pay lots of money for the sources of an application written in Delphi, if..."


02: The registration process sends a license which indicates the product +
your name + email address + home address

Not sure how this would work for a /company/ purchaser of Delphi
a) Tieing a licence to a particular named developer - what if s/he leaves?
b) Registering all the licences to "The Shady Software Company" (or even each to "developerX@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" where X=1,2,..N) doesn't seem to do much to prevent the other piracy issue (company deploying more licences than it has purchased)

c) Why do we need a registration service at all? Why can't this information be generated locally within the (off-line) installation process?



03: The license is signed with a private key

No problem with this


04: The Help->About form shows the license information

(If you meant only the "Help->About" - Why *only* the "Help->About"?)

Why not the IDE splash-screen? "This product is licensed to The Xyz Software Company"

Why not embed the (signed) key into each and every exe/dll/... produced by the system?

Our (fully-licenced) company would have no objection at all if the SerialNumber and our CompanyName was embedded in the EXE (as long as this embedded key was only tens of bytes, not megabytes).

In fact each of our programs *already* contains our Company Name (in the Legal Copyright field of the Version Info)


So who are all these shy developers (or companies) who might insist on retaining their anonymity?

--
Paul Scott
Information Management Systems
Macclesfield, UK.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Clarification about Delphi
    ... The biggest update for me is the inclusion of very nifty third party components for ... All developed using Delphi. ... smooth and easy to develop SOAP servers. ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)
  • Re: Is Delphi 8 dangerous ?
    ... I've got a very old newsreader that already uses threads. ... (wether or not there are many servers and clients), ... IMO this is where the split occurs: between those that use Delphi for Enterprise, ... that use it as an all-purpose language and development tool (like a VC++ with Delphi ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)
  • Re: OT: Yet Another Unhappy Customer for Vista
    ... I bet it's *much* cheaper to pay for a small team of full-time employees to run around changing out failed servers than it is to pay the *significant* premium to purchase "server grade" equipment that's probably really not nearly 5x as reliable. ... IOW a fleet purchase. ... And at 2x the above calculation manhours versus asset costs may become seriously lopsided. ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
  • Re: OT: Yet Another Unhappy Customer for Vista
    ... supposedly running something in the ballpark of 100,000 servers worldwide. ... gets) to purchase "server grade" equipment that's probably really not nearly ... PC configuration six months from now that you would today. ... And at 2x the above calculation manhours versus asset costs may become ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
  • Re: Make ME Want You
    ... > number of enhancements that drive me to purchase the product. ... > Delphi and my third party add-ons. ... This is a real problem for Borland. ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)