>1) A user of one of our applications wants to make changes. Yeah, we'd rather they come back to us for changes, but not a big deal.

I agree on this one, to a point. Since tech support is part of the package, why should we now have to support something we didn't write? Or for that matter, *how* can you even support it not knowing what was done to it?

>2) Someone thinks our application is so great, they want to modify and market it. Is this really likely?

You better believe it is! We sold many 000's of our application here in the US, Europe, South America. But only ever sold 1 copy in Asia. Being that our package was a widely accepted manufacturing package and a large portion of manufacturing has moved to Asia, I find that more than a little strange, don't you? I'm sure there are other factors to the differences in volume, but the numbers are overwhelming. Since I haven't been involved with this for quite awhile, the situation may have changed, but I seriously doubt it.
{update] We did know it was in wide spread use in Asia due to the tech support requests.

>3) Another developer wants to learn how we did something. Do we care? If they asked, wouldn't we show them the code?

Some cases yes, some cases no.

>4) We've built something into our app to prevent people from sharing it (like hard-coding company name in reports) and someone wants to change that so they can use the code without paying. If someone is willing to go to this length to steal the app, is this person ever going to buy it legitimately? Not likely. So there's no lost sale here, just the annoyance of someone getting the fruit of our work without paying.

Those situations are unavoidable, and that's why we made sure our information was widespread throughtout the package. For those "lost sales" we just viewed it as "paid advertising". If others were to see the package in use, they'd at least know where it came from.

>In the ultimate scheme of things, none of this is important enough for me to lose sleep over Refox.

For a one off, inexpensive application, that's true. For a high volume, big dollar package, sleep becomes uneasy.