Selling & Protecting Software

DavidUK | 13:19 Tue 13th Dec 2005 | Technology

4 Answers

Can anyone offer advice on this please? I am writing a small Visual Basic program that I believe to be quite novel and may be of interest to other people. What is the best way to protect and sell this software?

I am not expecting to make a lot of money from this but it would be nice to make something.

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Loosehead

Well perhaps if you gave us a clue as to it's purpose we may be able to suggest a selling approach. Protection is a bit more tricky, you can easily copyright the source code, the name, even the manuals but that does not stop someone writing more software to carry out the same function and calling it something else so the idea itself is very tricky to protect. For example I could write something that does the same job as excell and call it something different as long as it's all my own work there's not much Bill can do.

OBonio

The usual approach is to use a license key to protect the software (ie, a long string of characters). Like Windows for example. We use Xheo (a 3rd party app) to do this for our software.

If you are wanting to stop people from decompiling and using your code, then this can be a little tricky. .NET application are easily decompiled (ildasm) but can be made a little more difficult with obfuscation. There are 3rd party apps that can do this (Visual Studio .NET has one built in I think called Dotfuscator). Native binary executables are more difficult again to disassemble. Anyone doing this isn't going to be stopped I don't think.

DavidUK

Question Author

Thanks both for your advice. I accept that I can't prevent other people copying my idea. Also, I don't think decompiling is a problem because anyone could very easily write a program to do what my program does anyway.

As I said, it would just be nice to make something from my idea. I was assuming that I could set up a website selling the program but with at least some protection of the .exe file. I'm not clear how much Xheo would cost but I suspect it would be more than would be worthwhile. Is there any free, or at least cheap, way of preventing someone simply copying the .exe and passing it around?

OBonio

Have a look here :

http://www.codeproject.com/win32/simplecopyprotection.as p

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