>>>>>>><snip>
>>>>I propose we agree that there indeed is a third kind of user. See my reply to Denis: Message #973313
>>>
>>>It has nothing to do with how many types of users there are. It is only about whether you want to protect your apps or not, by how much, and from who.
>>
>>How experienced must one be to know for sure whether 'that much' and 'from those' is enough.
>
>That is a subject for you, as the defender, to study and understand. One thing is for sure - if your app (or product or whatever) runs on the end-user machine (ie; can get into the hands of a cracker, his physical environment) then it will be broken given enough time and motivation.
>
>VFP debug off and "encryption" is low to no protection from even the low to average crackers simply because it can be cracked using off the shelf products. It's a no brainer. The best protection for VFP apps is probably products like Konixse and Thinstall, but even they probably only rank as a medium level protection difficulty against a true expert cracker.
>
>What, from who, for how long.

I been following thread, and have found it an interesting topic.

But, here is a idea that has not been discussed.

Convert some of the subroutines (like business rules, mathimatical calculations, etc.) into a FLL library. The library is caomplied using C++ and is more difficult to decompile. This would defently up the protection of decompiling the original EXE and then recompiling it.

Oh, and include in the library a routine that validates that the EXE is the original and not a copy.

my 2 cents.