Re: Binding an application license to MAC Address?

On Thu, 07 Feb 2008 10:29:12 -0000, Jouni Aro <jouni.aro@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The biggest threat is that we sell one license to a corporate that would then "forget" to buy more licenses if they want to do several installations.

In my experience, that would very much depend on the size of the "corporate".

Larger (Public) companies are usually so paranoid about unlicensed software that they tend to have /more/ licences than they need. Yes you need a proper legal contract - but you'll have one of those already? :)

Smaller companies may be more lax about using unlicensed software - but then you have to balance your (hypothetical) financial loss against the damage you may cause to your existing customer base should your dongle/protection stop them using the software that _they_have_paid_for_

Yes, you will be annoyed that somebody got "something for nothing". But if they weren't going to buy those extra copies anyway then it hasn't actually cost *you* any real money at all. Neither has it cost *you* any real money to advertise, sell, install and support those systems.

If it helps, think of any additional copies as "shareware" - you've done the hard work and got additional *users* of your software - and each is one more potential *purchaser*.

In our experience, a contract for the licensed system and regular contact with the users - "Just checking that you are happy with our software... Now, how many of our systems do you have installed at the moment?" is all that is needed to keep our customers honest-enough.

We discarded our more extensive licensing (tied to the hardware id) when we saw how many customer support calls it was causing.

(That's not to say that we leave our programs completely wide-open - we still "protect" our programs and data by embedding the client's name and displaying it on the splash screen and on each print-out and we sort-of-protect our database with an Access password :). Although such protections could be easily overridden by the criminally-minded, they act as sufficient reminder to the "forgetful")

Unfortunately, CodeGear seems to follow the RIAA model that if a teenager rips 1,000 CD's and each CD retails for $X, then that implies an *actual* theft of $X,000. And such large losses *must* be prevented - almost regardless of any inconvenience it might cause to the law-abiding.

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

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