Fighting the Pirate
Six years ago I took the decision of investing my efforts into the creation of a software application. It was a complex project that potentially required thousands of hours of work. I had to make it financially viable. No sponsor was in sight, so the only solution was to make a commercial program and sell it. I was extremely lucky, because the facilities to sell it were readily available and convenient too. The difference between a normal application and a commercial one is that the latter must be copy-protected in some way. I had complete freedom about how which technology to choose to protect the program. It was clear to me, and still it is, that no money had to be spent for the protection. First, I was not sure that the product could sell enough to invest part of the money into its protection. Second, it's a non-sense to spend money to protect software by piracy. I think that those who steal a copy of a program are inherently thieves. They can't be convinced to buy a regular...