Product Licensing

Hey,

I was wondering, I've just finished a program I was developing and I intend to sell this, however I can't seem to figure out how to implement licensing, so far I've made it login to a website and compare an IP address and a serial/key (With the remote), but this can easily be bypassed with a little coding knowledge and the windows hosts file.

The only things I am capable of doing atm is just making the crackers task tedious (For example using random subdomains for the requests).

I hope some people here have experience with these kind of things, and can point me in the right direction.

Thanks for your attention, Xeross

sometimes the best licensing is to simply rely on people's good will in honoring the licensing. No matter what you set up, someone is likely to crack it. What you don't want to do is create a security scheme that hinders the use of the software once it is registered.

I believe the type of scheme you create is relative to the type of software it is being applied to. For corporate level software, less is needed because corporations don't want to risk license violations. For something more mass market like a game, the chances of copying and pirating go way up.

Of course, this is simply my answer and I have nothing to substantiate it ;) :)

Brad!

I'll just make it as hard to crack as possible, not as in complicated protection but just simple protection on a massive scale. so they just give up because it takes too long.

But, if anyone WANTS to crack it, they will probably end up cracking it. You can pay someone else to be responsible for keys and registration, and let them handle it. You can also release apps via Remote Desktop, so that nobody CAN crack the software, because it's on YOUR machine

Well if it takes em a long while to crack the application it means they have to spend that time cracking it with every new version, so the longer it takes them the less it will be cracked.

Also I was wondering if I use 1 central function to validate the license can they somehow bypass/disable this function completely from something like OlyDbg ?

It's coded in VB6 btw, I dunno if that makes it easier to decompile (Yes I need to rewrite it in C++, Yes I hate vb)

Regards, Xeross