>>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.

So this, then, comes down to the question of whether those were really lost sales or just unlicensed users? Do you have any evidence that someone decompiled and changed the code rather than simply selling or giving away your package?

BTW, I do agree that this is a much bigger issue for a vertical than it is for custom software.

Tamar