keyless wrote:I certainly think a good homebuilt system would be good, but I really think it would take a huge anmount of time and development to get it right. Especially if you do have a focus on the Windows market, where the Warze release groups hone in on your PAD file and crack your software the day it is released.
Actually, you should have three days before a crack appears.
That's the average amount of time between release and first crack for most commercial software, whether from Microsoft, Adobe, or small shops likes yours and mine.
If a developer is willing to spend a million dollars on security, such as the games industry does, it only extends the average to about 90 days.
A brief search on the web shows cracks available for PC Guard as well, though in all fairness I don't know how current those are. Even the Pentagon's servers get cracked; nothing is completely safe.
The bottom line is that when you have dozens of people (or with more popular apps maybe hundreds) focused on cracking your software, they will find a way in and there's nothing you can do about it.
One of the toughest lessons for new software publishers is to become comfortable with piracy. It will happen, and there's a point of diminishing returns with attempts to prevent it; it's possible to spend more protecting software than the sales lost.
And that's really the key: Remember that a crack download is not necessarily a lost sale.
In fact, many people who frequent crack sites have a "hoader" mentality, where they download stuff just for the sake of having it, but don't actually use it and would never bother even downloading it at all if a crack wasn't available.
I make a product for qualitative data analysis, one of the least interesting software categories around unless you're a sociologist. Like clockwork, within the first week of release a crack appeared on a Russian server and we had thousands of extra downloads. But I doubt any of those people were doing sociology research.
The percentage of people who might actually pay for a software product but would consider a cracked copy if available is very, very small. So small, in fact, that the Software Publishers Association does a a great disservice to their members by continuing to use their traditional methodology for tallying losses (counting every download as a lost sale). While this results in alarming numbers, it doesn't reflect anything about the psychology or buying habits of people in the real world, resulting in a statistic that is ultimately meaningless.
Most potential customers are basically honest. As long as you provide even a modest level of security to minimize the temptation of using it for free, and assuming that your product's pricing is reasonably low enough to demonstrate unquestionable value for the purchaser (a must with any product), most people willing to pay for software will pay for yours.
If your product is in a high-risk category (games or, ironically enough, music; music-making software is the second most commonly pirated category), it may be beneficial to consider a "phone home" system, in which your software validates the registration with a simple call to a CGI on your server. This gives you the opportunity to maintain your registration database easily, even as you later pick up distributors, and allows you to verify that a given key is used only once.
But for most software, I'd rather put the investment into features.
Beyond the most basic level security does little to drive sales, and complex security can even hamper sales. But features drive sales.
You'll get far more bang for your development buck maximizing the time you spend on features and marketing than worrying about a piracy problem that can never really be stopped anyway, and most of which will have no effect on your bottom line either way.
