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Comment by Cozumel | Hacker News Reader

Piracy is a huge issue, one way around it, although too late for you now, is to only sell an online hosted version of your software, they can't crack what they don't have access too.

Have you got a forum to engage your customers with directly? Most times (and this is a huge generalisation) but these consumers aren't 'evil', they just either have no money or don't know any better.

If you can engage with them and get them to like you it'll make them more disinclined to pirate you, you could also give away a 'lite' version, there's no need to pirate your software if they get it for free, then concentrate on adding more features to the regular priced one for them to upgrade too eventually.

There's no real technical solution to piracy, it's always going to be a human issue so needs to be looked at from that perspective.

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Thanks for the answer ! I like the lite idea,

   although too late for you now, is to only sell an online hosted version of your software,
   they can't crack what they don't have access too

I've thought about it and it's an excellent solution because I could link the software to a website with a subscription based business model. And my software could be better with internet / community feature inside it ! But it's for mid term not for now (I have to recode everything and develop a new product..)

   Have you got a forum to engage your
   customers with directly?

I'm going to sign up in the private forums and engage with them. I hope I won't be banned from the forum !

An approach I took in your situation was to actually sign up to the forums, I became moderator there and then didn't allow anyone to share my stuff! The flip side though is you still have to allow people to share other peoples stuff so morally it's a grey area. Whatever you choose though, good luck!

Lol nice. I'm just going to try to answers theirs question that's all.

Isn't there a key feature of your software that you could change to make it online only ?

Not checking the serial or user, this can be (and mostly is) suppressed by a crack.

But an important proprietary function that can't be to easily emulate by a crack and your software can't fully work without. Nowadays there is no more internet access limitations for stuff like that (that's why SaaS is booming for years).

And this could be the first step to your full online version.

I could make the UI online and ship the app with a Chromium browser :D

Well, why not :-) ?

I've already done software like that. Still don't know what's yours, but in our case, it was for kiosks and access points. All the UI was online (so if the client ask for UI change, it's automatically updated on every kiosks or access points), and the hardware related code was on the C# software installed (using a scanner, a barcode reader, printing stuff, etc...)

Of course it's pretty specific, but as we have to create a key for every licence, you can't have two running at the same time, so no crack.

We had bad experience, as a guy to which we sold a licence of the first version of our soft (some nearly 20 years ago), where we just checked if the serial was ok, installed it on multiple places and we found out totally randomly, 2 or 3 years later !

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