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>I'm not talking about some magic utility here...I'm talking about extorsion, remember? Not having to pay for Refox to protect yourself from Refox.

OK Victor, I am up for the game but it’s a long post :) Lets accept and ignore the fact that an anti-Refox specific tool would be useless for protection and lets focus on your direct accusation against Refox - extortion.

Extortion is a very strong word and you have accused Refox of this quite a few times. The definition of extortion generally goes along the lines of obtaining money or property by the use of force, threat, coercion, intimidation, and the like. It is also, by the way, considered in most countries (that I am a little familiar with) as a criminal offence.

Some points:

1) Clearly the VFP community at large does not appear to share this same accusation of Refox as you and Peter. The product has been around for a very long time and I have not seen too many complaints about it.

2) The primary purpose of Refox is the ability to recover source code from applications when the original source has been lost. This is both the stated purpose of the product and the demonstrate-able purpose of the product as witnessed by those people who have had need to use it to save their asses.

3) The fact that Refox can in addition prevent Refox itself from decompiling an application was added later, not initially, and is the crux of your extortion claim.

So:

1) If Refox were to remove the ability for Refox to "protect" an app from Refox would this make you happy? Refox could not very well be accused of extortion if Refox could not protect you from Refox itself. Then it would be a pure de-compiler only.

2) If Refox did not contain anti-Refox protection then your claim could only be that its a cracking tool and unethical. But the counter claim would be that it’s a source code recovery tool. Which is it really? That would depend on the user and not the tool.

3) The claim of extortion, imo, goes to the motivation of the developer. If the motivation was that Jan was going to build a tool with which he can threaten developers and force them to buy his protection then one could claim extortion, sort of, because you dont have to buy his protection after all. You could buy any number of other protection options (which I might add are far better than the Refox protection). So if Jan's motivation was to extort you by forcing you to buy Refox then he hasn’t done a very good job because one is free to buy other and better anti-cracking protections.

4) You choose to believe that Jan is trying to extort you. However, neither you nor I can actually know the true thoughts of a man. You choose to believe his motivation was to build a product for extortion. I choose to believe that the product was built as a source code recovery tool. My choice is supported by the fact that Refox protection was only added later.

5) Those people who feel extorted into buying Refox in order to protect themselves from Refox are also not too bright. They are buying a product specific protection, a fundamentally flawed approach to protection. You do not buy an anti-virus program that is virus specific. You buy a product that hopefully protects against all viruses. So those who bought Refox to protect against Refox made a mistake and wasted their money. They should have bought a more generic protection.

I would conclude that the claim of extortion is not supported by;

(a) the historical time line development of the product

(b) the lack of support for the claim in the community at large

(c) the demonstrated usefulness of the source code recovery

(d) that the claim of extortion would depend on the motivation of the Refox developer to which no one can know the truth of, but most of all …

(e) that the claimed extortion is completely ineffective. For someone to protect themselves against Refox only would be stupid and would still require the use of other protection tools and hence would be an ineffective extortion approach.

If one buys Refox to protect themselves from Refox (the claim of extortion) what am I really trying to protect myself from? From the cracker threat since I do not need protection from honest Refox users, only the dishonest ones. Therefore I would be buying a product specific protection solution that would not be effective against the stated threat, the cracker. This does not make for a very good extortion approach by Jan and would explain why I for one have not bought Refox for protection from Refox but have spent in fact far more money on other protection systems.