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Show HN: Add license key verification to your apps

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Re: Show HN: Add license key verification to your apps

#61

Post by ptx »

metaobserver wrote: post #52
ddevault wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's my computer, not yours. If you want to run software on it, I get to see the source code, that's the deal. We could agree that I can't use your software under these terms, but this would exploit those who don't understand the value of the source code. This is how spyware is born. If it runs on my machine, it's open source, or it's bunk. And, once again, you can sell open source software .

If it's sandboxed and accesses only the resources (network, disk etc.) you explicitly allow it to, you don't need to know how the processing is done. Spyware is not born out of legally obtained closed-source software. It's born out of corporations selling centralized SaaS, infringing on users' privacy and locking them in by design . The very same corporations championing OSS big time, because it benefits their spywar…

Software that can't access my resources is usually not going to be very useful. If it does get access, I have to trust it with my data, so it needs to be trustworthy. Sandboxing doesn't solve the problem.

Re: Show HN: Add license key verification to your apps

#62

Post by stevenjohns »

paypalcust83 wrote: post #14

Be very careful with licensing. VMware early-on had licensing code that disabled a customer's app and cost them a lot of money. Licensing of enterprise features is best to have a nag screen and disable some future actions rather than drop a ban-hammer. They were forced to strip out that code and ended up with weak enforcement of licensing. Telemetry and online verification are unacceptable to some customers of on-pre…

Nothing is worse than the licensing of Archicad.

Downloaded the trial? Great! Enjoy.

If you don’t read the license terms, then you don’t find out that anything created or edited with the trial version is encrypted to the installation. I found out about this by searching the error code I was faced with after the fact.

I lost weeks of work, couldn’t even buy a license key to unlock it as I had reinstalled the software (within the trial period).

Needless to say, Graphisoft will never see a penny out of me.

Re: Show HN: Add license key verification to your apps

#63

Post by toyg »

ptx wrote: post #47
paypalcust83 wrote: post #14

Be very careful with licensing. VMware early-on had licensing code that disabled a customer's app and cost them a lot of money. Licensing of enterprise features is best to have a nag screen and disable some future actions rather than drop a ban-hammer. They were forced to strip out that code and ended up with weak enforcement of licensing. Telemetry and online verification are unacceptable to some customers of on-pre…

> open sources surveillance (search engines and warez sites) That's the first time I've heard "open source" used to refer to a warez site. Is this overloading of the term being seeded by someone in order to, in a roundabout way, discredit the open source movement? A few years ago there would have been an obvious suspect for such FUD, but they seem to have embraced open source these days, so that wouldn't make sense.…

"Open source" is a term long-used in intelligence/police circles that refers to the means of obtaining information, e.g. a newspaper article is an open source.

As most intelligence-related terms do, it has inevitably spread out to the wider audience of wannabes and obsessives about military things. Realistically, you don't use it in normal conversation, particularly in places like HN, precisely to avoid confusion... unless one wants to signal that he's using it in the "intelligence" term, i.e. that one is a sad wannabe.

Re: Show HN: Add license key verification to your apps

#64

Post by toyg »

looping__lui wrote: post #32

Personally I found LimeLM offering a pretty amazing and sophisticated product at very decent prices. Personally, I would never want to suffer the pain of keeping licensing servers running etc. :-) In my experience, software licensing will just “get rid of the casual piracy” - but I could never see not having a licensing solution in software work for business... Beyond protecting software I found it similarly necessar…

> I could never see not having a licensing solution in software work for business

The most business-y of business-y tech businesses, Oracle, doesn't use license keys. Everyone can download pretty much any of their products. When they acquired the company I worked for, the first thing they did was to release master licenses to everyone for free. Saved us peons in the support trenches the aggro of dealing with a terrible license-server we embedded, the name of which I've mercifully forgotten.

How do they do it? Their audience are legitimate businesses who would rather stay on the right side of the law than save a few pennies here and there. And Oracle won't answer the phone unless you have a paid support contract.

Obviously this model won't work for everyone, but IMHO businesses who sell to businesses can live happily without license keys (and the stress/costs they generate on their support operations).

Re: Show HN: Add license key verification to your apps

#65

Post by danenania »

huhtenberg wrote: post #51
rsp1984 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but note that in many cases the goal is not absolute security but rather making it as inconvenient as possible for someone to circumvent the licensing. In some cases the licensing security is even weak by design, e.g. Windows 95 or the early AutoCAD. This is desirable when the size of the userbase itself is of value (which is actually true for a lot of software!).

Cases like W95 and Photoshop are exceptional edge cases that worked for them as a part of a very aggressive marketing push with a very long-term market domination goal. It doesn't apply to ISV products that need to feed their devs right now . If you add licensing enforcement into your program, making it trivially breakable is just... dumb. At the very least it will pollute the heck out of native search results with a…

It depends a lot on where your revenue comes from. If it comes from large businesses, realistically they aren’t likely to pirate since it’s a legal risk to them and a hassle compared to just buying the thing. In that case, some token DRM could be enough.

Re: Show HN: Add license key verification to your apps

#66

Post by rahimnathwani »

toyg wrote: post #64
looping__lui wrote: post #32

Personally I found LimeLM offering a pretty amazing and sophisticated product at very decent prices. Personally, I would never want to suffer the pain of keeping licensing servers running etc. :-) In my experience, software licensing will just “get rid of the casual piracy” - but I could never see not having a licensing solution in software work for business... Beyond protecting software I found it similarly necessar…

> I could never see not having a licensing solution in software work for business The most business-y of business-y tech businesses, Oracle, doesn't use license keys. Everyone can download pretty much any of their products. When they acquired the company I worked for, the first thing they did was to release master licenses to everyone for free. Saved us peons in the support trenches the aggro of dealing with a terrib…

Oracle does not rely on companies' good intention, or their need for ongoing support.

They use contracts and audits to make sure they get what they're owed. If you can force companies to pay after they start using something, then making it as easy as possible for them to expand usage is going to maximise your revenue.

Google 'Oracle License Audit' or 'Oracle LMS' to learn more.

Re: Show HN: Add license key verification to your apps

#67

Post by akerl_ »

ddevault wrote: post #9

It is unethical for end-user software to be closed source, and this project is wrong for enabling this.

If I choose to make software and publish binaries on a website without the source, how is that action unethical?

Does it become unethical if somebody downloads and runs it? Or only if I suggest it might be worth downloading and running? Or if I ask for money in exchange for it?

Re: Show HN: Add license key verification to your apps

#68

Post by toyg »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #66
toyg wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I could never see not having a licensing solution in software work for business The most business-y of business-y tech businesses, Oracle, doesn't use license keys. Everyone can download pretty much any of their products. When they acquired the company I worked for, the first thing they did was to release master licenses to everyone for free. Saved us peons in the support trenches the aggro of dealing with a terrib…

Oracle does not rely on companies' good intention, or their need for ongoing support. They use contracts and audits to make sure they get what they're owed. If you can force companies to pay after they start using something, then making it as easy as possible for them to expand usage is going to maximise your revenue. Google 'Oracle License Audit' or 'Oracle LMS' to learn more.

Man, I worked for them, I know the score :)

And that's precisely what I said: they just use the law ("contracts"). Legitimate businesses don't want problems with the law. It's more effective, for Oracle, to carefully draft (and subsequently enforce) legal documents, than to add some rigamarole that will only make life harder for legitimate clients and their own support ops.

Re: Show HN: Add license key verification to your apps

#69

Post by p_l »

ptx wrote: post #57
frobozz wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open Source surveillance means "looking for/at stuff that is openly published" - e.g. looking on warez sites for keys being shared.. I'm pretty sure the term has been in use since the 1940s

Ah, I guess so. Thanks. Perhaps my tinfoil hat got in the way of seeing the context.

It is called some other terms depending on country, so it can be non-trivial to grok when you first encounter it.

(For years, I knew it as "White Intelligence")

Re: Show HN: Add license key verification to your apps

#70

Post by bscphil »

danenania wrote: post #65
huhtenberg wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cases like W95 and Photoshop are exceptional edge cases that worked for them as a part of a very aggressive marketing push with a very long-term market domination goal. It doesn't apply to ISV products that need to feed their devs right now . If you add licensing enforcement into your program, making it trivially breakable is just... dumb. At the very least it will pollute the heck out of native search results with a…

It depends a lot on where your revenue comes from. If it comes from large businesses, realistically they aren’t likely to pirate since it’s a legal risk to them and a hassle compared to just buying the thing. In that case, some token DRM could be enough.

> If it comes from large businesses, realistically they aren’t likely to pirate since it’s a legal risk to them

In that case, wouldn't a "free for personal use" license be sufficient? I know some software Oracle's VirtualBox, for example, implement something like this and it must work for them because they come down hard on supposed violators.

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