Re: Time limited program

On Jan 2, 6:51 am, alexandre_pater...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
On Jan 2, 4:49 am, "Ken T." <nowh...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
...

Is there a good way to do this?

Online licence check.

Throbbing with evil.

Correctly done, for applications that mandates an
Internet connection and where part of the processing
happens on the server side, this is simply impossible
to crack (e.g. in more than 5 years nobody cracked
Blizzard's online licence check allowing players to
play World of Warcraft on Blizzard's battlenet).

This one instance, maybe not so evil. If you view it as Blizzard
charging for access to their battlenet service, an ongoing service it
costs them ongoing money to provide, then there's no artificial
scarcity or intentional crippling going on here when they authenticate
access to those servers to limit it to only paying subscribers.

OTOH, not letting people use the WoW client to play on third-party
servers is evil. It wouldn't cost Blizzard anything to do this.
Although they would have to compete with third-party servers, I find
it hard to imagine that they wouldn't retain market leader position in
providing Warcraft worlds, given how much content they've created on
their servers and that they have a concentration of expertise in the
game platform unmatched by any plausible near-term rival.

If, someday, a third-party service was better/cheaper/whatever enough
to start reducing Blizzard's subscriber base, well, that's business.
Third-party services would mostly grow the market, though, I expect.
Some people might subscribe to more than one, perhaps Blizzard's and a
third-party one.

Actually, thinking about it more, the MMORPG itself is really what
lives on the server; the client software could be made into generic
"MMORPG client" software that could be used to play various MMORPGs
hosted by various companies. Some might be pay, some not; different
content and adventures at different ones. A thriving marketplace of
competition.

Note that if your application isn't designed per se to
require an Internet connection, you can "force" it to
do so (if it's reasonnable for you to require your
customers to have Internet access to use your app).

This, of course, is evil.

I'm contracting for a company that sells license to
hundreds of customers and we only allow our app to
be used for 48 hours without Internet connection.

Why does your company want to go an extra mile to make its product
less useful and less valuable? That is not typically a winning
strategy for attracting and keeping customers. Just ask EA, whose
Spore game's evil DRM caused them some embarrassment recently and
lackluster sales, or Sony, whose rootkit fiasco will live in infamy
for quite some time to come.

I know that if I were a CIO/CTO at a business, one look at your
company's "license terms" would have me shopping elsewhere. No way
would I, in such a position of responsibility, allow my company to
become that dependent on yours' goodwill! It would be a security hole
a mile wide. Not only could your company pull the plug on some of our
tools arbitrarily, by accident or intention, but it might simply no
longer exist some day. Furthermore, your company's software will have
gratuitous bugs and requirements that make it less useful due to your
company's evil scheme. That makes it less worthwhile to us, even
though it is probably also more expensive than the alternatives, since
you're probably betting that your artificial scarcity scheme will let
you charge through the nose for it.

Of course, it also won't have escaped my notice that you could
blackmail your users at some later date by threatening to turn off
their copies of the software remotely if they don't pony up some more
money. And what if we ever directly competed with you in some market?
Wouldn't yours be tempted to sabotage ours?

Nevermind that a malicious hacker might figure out a way to disrupt
your "license check" nonsense. Your software has a security
vulnerability to denial-of-service attack that's wholly gratuitous.

A program that is not inherently a network client -- so, one like a
word processor or a spread*** or some other tool that tends to be
used on local data -- is like a power drill. It won't work if there's
no electricity, but once you have one, it should certainly be yours to
continue using as you see fit, independently of the fortunes of the
manufacturer.

I wouldn't buy a Black and Decker power drill for company use if Black
and Decker made it so that they could remote deactivate the drill to
force payment, or on suspicion of the drill being a cheap knock-off
instead of genuine, or for whatever other reason, either. Especially
not if said deactivation was on a deadman switch. If Black and Decker
were to go under, why should all of our power drills stop working and
need to be replaced at great expense, when there is no logical reason
they can't keep working? OK, we won't be able to get warranty repairs
on them anymore, but they might each have years of useful life left to
them. With software, the situation is potentially even better. There
may be no more official bugfixes or support once the original vendor
disappears from the scene, but the software itself has no moving parts
and never wears out, so long as you can preserve copies on suitable
media and have hardware that will run it that's in working order. Even
after that, there is emulation. Software is potentially forever,
unless of course you do something stupid to cripple it and then charge
people extra for the privilege of having software that will "rot"!

[rest of evil scheme deleted]

You use such a silly strategy if you want to. The OP can make up his
own mind whether it's in his best interests to make his products less
valuable and less useful, more brittle including security flaws, but
simultaneously more expensive for his customers. I'm guessing that it
isn't, but again, it's up to the OP to make up his own mind.

At least he can now do so with full knowledge of the potential costs
and consequences of choosing a short-sighted, next-quarter's-profit-
motivated business strategy based on artificial scarcity and creating
an adversarial relationship with customers instead of one based on
building up a market for what's genuinely scarce (access to his
expertise and support staff and the like) and building customer
goodwill.
.