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Is Refox still around
Message
From
26/01/2007 11:41:14
 
 
To
26/01/2007 08:12:34
General information
Forum:
Visual FoxPro
Category:
Third party products
Environment versions
Visual FoxPro:
VFP 6
Miscellaneous
Thread ID:
01186312
Message ID:
01189686
Views:
6
>>>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?

A few of the tech support requests came through with bogus keys that didn't match any existing customer, keys were individual for each customer. Since they were really live working keys, they had to have gotten them in some manner. Most were just made up numbers, but they had to have had some sort of working key, unless they de-compiled and bypassed the checks, or had someone pass them live keys from within (not very likely). So it could have been a mix of copied vs. decompiled. We never did pursue it as it was too big of an expense, and not likely to have been very successful. We just had to bite the bullet and write that off as paid advertising. Nobody ever complained that we denied them tech support in those instances. I can only ever remember one occurrence of this happening here (USA), and that "copy" eventually did become a sale. We also had trial versions that worked for up to 6 months available, but those were limited in some capabilities, not full blown packages. A fairly large portion of the trial versions became actual sales. If any of these trial versions were ever de-compiled, we weren't aware of it. If they didn't call us, or somebody tell us about it, we had no way of knowing.

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

Now that I can agree with.
Fred
Microsoft Visual FoxPro MVP

foxcentral.net
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