[deleted]
Show HN: Add license key verification to your apps
81–90 of 95 posts
Re: Show HN: Add license key verification to your apps
#82[deleted]
Re: Show HN: Add license key verification to your apps
#83It is unethical for end-user software to be closed source, and this project is wrong for enabling this.
Who says this has to be implemented in a closed source application? And it’s hardly licensing that enables closed source applications... it’s compilers that do that. :)
Re: Show HN: Add license key verification to your apps
#84I can prob patch this over in the time it takes to finish a mug of coffee
Re: Show HN: Add license key verification to your apps
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Minor nit, open source != free as in beer. In FSF philosophy it's not wrong to charge money. It is wrong not to include the source with the customer's purchase.
I love open source software and use it everyday, so this question is coming from genuine curiosity. I'm a bit conflicted about how I feel above the "ethical" argument for OSS. Why is closed source software unethical? Is it unethical for McDonald's to sell me a Big Mac, even though they won't provide the recipe for the secret sauce (yes I know it's Thousand Island dressing)?
A closer real-world analogy is "is it unethical for john deere to sell a tractor that you're not able to service due to artificial restrictions".
But the McDonalds one sorta holds up too. Let's examine the 4 freedoms:
1. Freedom to eat the food you purchased using any utensils (freedom 0)
2. Freedom to modify the food (i.e. add ketchup or hot sauce) and study it (investigate the ingredients in it, i.e. ask how much sodium is in it, or if the oil it was cooked in was meat oil).
3. Freedom to share an unmodified piece of the food with others (give a friend some fries)
4. Freedom to share the food, even if you've modified it or attempted to copy it (give your friend fries with ketchup on it, freedom to share your home-made fries modeled after McDs with a friend).
It's arguable if "provide the recipe" needs to be included in those freedoms. Maybe. Either way, I'd argue that yes, it's unethical for macdonalds to sell you food without at the very least giving you the above freedoms, and also telling you all important ingredients in it (allergens and nutritional info, etc)
The reason people aren't complaining about freedom wrt food is because the freedoms are already mostly there. Software licensing commonly requires things like "you can't use this software without an active internet connection to verify you purchased it", or "you can't install it on two computers". I've yet to find a food that has a limitation of "you can only eat this food if you're on the phone with us so we can verify you're not putting ketchup on it".
If food was restricted in the same ways software is, I would call it unethical, yes. Selling mystery food with no ingredient list, that I'm not allowed to attempt to make my own variant of, that I can't add any additional ingredients to, and that I can't eat at my leisure.. yeah, that would be either unethical or a form of performance art.
Re: Show HN: Add license key verification to your apps
#86Personally 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…
> ...that minimize the frustration for paying customers whilst also protecting your IP...
Media publishers generally do the reverse.
Make the customer pain in the ass (like require expensive hardware and software that needs to pay every year) only to play your blueray disk.
While pirates don't need to suffer and just play it as they want everywhere because they obviously won't copy those shit.
Re: Show HN: Add license key verification to your apps
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Right, but the cost of enforcement doesn't scale linearly with licence cost. If your median customer spends millions with you per year, you can afford to spend money on enforcement. If your median customer spends $10k/year, I don't see how you can compel them to submit to an audit, or how you can get positive ROI from enforcement activities. This is one of the benefits of SaaS (for sellers).
You’d be surprised how far a couple of graceful but stern legal-looking template letters can go.
Of course SaaS is a solution, but that doesn’t really apply to the type of software that requires license keys (i.e. standalone and likely behind the firewall).
Re: Show HN: Add license key verification to your apps
#88Re: Show HN: Add license key verification to your apps
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The best tool is the one I know".
Except when it's not. :)
I don't compare HTML vs. C here, obviously I am talking about databases. All personal feelings aside, there is no technical reason to NOT use MongoDB as a key value store if one has experience with it, because after release comes maintenance and learning a new tool while fixing production problems doesn't make sense to me.
Re: Show HN: Add license key verification to your apps
#90No to be harsh, but this is largely useless. The biggest issues with in-app licensing is (1) Binding licensing to the machine (or the user!) (2) Making sure that your licensing check can't be NOP'ed by a l33r haxxor within 5 minutes of the release. Tangential to that is (3) which is an ability to tolerate minor changed to the machine and OS reinstalls without invalidating the license. (1) and (3) aren't hard to solve…
I really believe this is why SaaS is such a dominating business model now. Software licensing failed because it is technically impossible, and no amount of clever tricks will save you from determined groups / individuals. If it runs on your machine, you will be able to get it to run again without the licensing requirements. We saw large companies get pwned time and time again. On the other hand, there is no way you c…
This is not true for business applications and many customer ones.
Enterprises cannot risk legal problems. And home customers will buy licenses if price is fair.