>>Metin, I know John is a big promoter of this VFP C compiler...

I don't see myself as a promoter, merely an early customer who has undertaken some very serious investigation and cheerfully shares the result.

>>Start with this: "hackers won't pay and clients don't hack". That is a really basic premise which is true for the vast majority of cases.

Depends. Increasingly apps need credentials to access services. Everything from credit card transactions to e-commerce to online ordering to... so, if it's easy to lift credentials from your work, the same people who spoof passwords, skim credit cards and hack VOIP gleefully will leech off your accounts or rack up huge transactions from their proxy servers or otherwise steal from you and your customers' business. We do have a responsibility to protect customers from this and to prevent code falling into the hands of distant thieves.

In addition, there *are* customers out there who resent paying support and decide they can do it themselves. I know of a customer who decompiled a VFP app and planned to take it over and pay nothing further because they'd paid support for years and decided that this equated to a purchase of the sourcecode.

The other issue would be competitive advantage. If there are two similar businesses, one of whom invests in good product and the other of whom simply lifts the result, competitively the second company is in a much better position. When I do hear about this, often it's a dealer or similar who decides that they want it all for themselves.

Seems to me that the basic premise is that it's worth a few hundred bucks to hold the door shut whether there's somebody trying to bash it down or not.