Real,

I haven't studied the Software market in Canada or in USA, but living here (in USA) I noticed, that all users are always honest and pay for their software.

And if a good haker accidentally find your software to be interesting for him, he can broke your protection in a few minutes.

In Russia I discussed this problem in FoxPro forum and even at this time (~5 years ago) one of the FP mentors Mike Korneev wrote me, that it's worth to protect our software, despite the fact, in Russia we've never buy software and always used already broken copies. I think (not sure) that ReFox was created in Russia.

Anyway, I developed in this old time a very complicated algorithm for protection and we used it in the distribution of our product.

I'm also sure, that there are lots of really well-designed algorithms for this purpose. But as I said, it's unnecessary here.

This is my opinion.

>What is the best method to protect a software?
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>I have heard that some programmers are protecting their software by reading the hard disk serial number and make sure that the software is only working on this hard disk.
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>I am a developper myself and I don't want anybody to steal any of my applications, that's for sure. But I'm not sure this is honest with the customer. In our days, nobody is sure of anything and what if the hard disk breaks and the source company is not there anymore?
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>If this is not a good method, then what would be a good one?
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>Some protection interface plugs with a unique serial number (printer interface) sound pretty good but more difficult to apply when the customers are all over Europe and you live in Canada.
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>I plan to add a module to an existing vertical market application that would bring more revenue to the user. I intend to share the revenues on a monthly basis with the store. Once the payment is done, a password (with my own algorithm based on date and other things so the password is always different) is given to the customer for another month validation and so on.
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>I'm almost sure that some will try to break the code.
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>I would like to discust this matter with anyone having some experience or any opinion to share.