Sandi, I'm a bit confused :) Do you want to protect your source code or a compiled VFP exe?

1) If its source code then your only real choice will be a legal one where you copyright the concept embodied in the code and/or the programming techniques and/or any other special or specific thing about your code. You would also need to get your client to sign an NDA agreement. All in all though this will be tough to protect since a competent programmer can review your code to understand the principles and then probably develop a variation of it which is now "different and not yours anymore.

2) If its the exe you want to protect then there are several programs which can help to protect you. The three most popular ones discussed here on the UT are:

a) ReFox - http://www.xitech-europe.co.uk/ReFox.html
b) KONxiSE - http://www.xitech-europe.co.uk/Konxise/index.html
c) Armadillo - http://www.siliconrealms.com/

There are others. However, all of these products are ultimately crackable and so no tool will give you 100% protection.

3) In respect of only allowing certain copies to be made - the easiest solution is to require each copy of your exe to have an installation key entered to unlock it which is unique to each specific PC that it is run on. There are various ways to do this using encrypted registry keys or an encrypted field in a file.


>Hi. I am preparing to sell my source code to users/developers and need a simple method to protect someone from creating an executable and selling it based on my source code. I want to 'license' a company for the source code usage but stop/prevent the licensed company from giving/selling copies of my source to other companies without compensation for me. I currently use safeserial for compiled copies but the problem with it is if you mess with the files (even accidently like copying them, deleting them, etc.) the serial number becomes invalid, also if you need to reinstall the app you need a new serial number. I dont want to have to generate serial numbers for ever for people as the code will be sold as-is with pay for support if required and the client I am going to sell it to first tends to have network issues that invalidate the serial number. Is there a way to build a non visible/non accessible method or something that I could code to match a customer's name (user will input in the
>application). I would like the solution to be entirely in foxpro as I dont have access to a c compiler.
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>TIA,
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>Sandi Cassidy