Ooops! Now Jan has lost 80% of his client-base.
The assumption in your statement is that Jan's client base "buy" Jan because she has the magical black box. Clients are not buying the black box - they're buying Jan because she takes care of them. The black box is an extension of Jan, not the other way round.

Try it - walk into a shop where you know of a special house keeping app. Tell them you have a better, cheaper one that is exactly like Jan's. Push the button on a stop watch. Report back when you sell the seat and tell us how long it took.

The way to Jan's clients are through Jan, not her technology. Should one desire Jan's clients and Jan's technology, one should simply buy Jan's company! That would be a lot more profitable tha trying to sneak in with a ripped off copyright.

I hear what you're saying, but I cannot imagine a situation like the one you propose. That kind of stuff never happens. Especially with the kinds of solutions we do with VFP. It's not like we're writing 1024 bit encryption drivers for CYSCO firmware. We're writting meat and potato public domain processes. If the stuff looks like propietary smarty pants "hairy" pricing iterations in the actual source, think how it would look in decompiled source. Almost unreadable.

No worries I can see.