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Comment by nadam | Hacker News Reader

A question to those who are more experienced than me:

I know that crackers are a big problem in the case of 'consumer software' e.g. games, simple utilities. My assumption is that this is not a problem in case of software specifically created for small and medium-sized companies. So currently I think I will not build any copyright protection into the software I am creating right now. I assume that companies (at least in the 'developed countires') mostly play fair (-> behave according to the license of the software). Is my assumption right?

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My experience is that companies generally have the intention of playing fair and paying for all the licenses they need, but without any license protection enforcing it, nobody is going to keep an eye on how many people are actually using the software within the organisation.

This is exactly right - licensing exists for enforcing contracts. Weak systems (e.g. serial-only licensing) results in actual lost sales. It's not always malicious thieving - mostly it's just inefficient bureaucracy.

This means you should either protect your software using hardware dongles, or online activation. Hardware dongles are a pain in the ass and will increase your support costs, but some companies prefer them.

Nadam, if you're looking for licensing and online activation we're the makers of LimeLM (http://wyday.com/limelm/ ). Or you can build your own. But we do offer entrepreneur friendly pricing.

I think it depends on how expensive your software is, and who makes the 'decision'.

I've seen thousands of WinZip installs go unlicensed for years.

I doubt anybody pirates Oracle for business use though.

Thanks. My software is somewhere in-between: Both its price and its 'importance for the business' is somewhere between WinZip and Oracle.

Same experience here, but consider this:

WinZip will work forever without being licensed. Oracle makes you buy a new license for every core.

Part of it might be the cost of the software, but pirating Oracle is also much harder than pirating WinZip.

Actually Corel just changed winzip to stop working after 60 days and saw a sales increase of 20%.

I always wondered how they made any money - then I did some work for the US DoD. Nearly every desktop has a licensed copy of WinZip! My new firm has WinZip licenses as well - while Windows can do zip files natively now, it still cannot (as far as I know?) encrypt them natively.

Licensing 'dongles' are pretty common for more expensive business software, HASP is a common licensing dongle for example, http://www.aladdin.com/

In my experience, medium to large organizations are usually mostly pretty good about licensing software.

Small companies with no dedicated IT staff? Not so much.

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