Quick Survey: Software Activation [modified]

[Rama Krishna Vavilala]

How many of you have some kind of activation built into your commercial software? By Activation I imply something similar to Windows activation. Do you:- 1. Have some basic license key which users enter and it is validated entirely during setup? 2. Go beyond 1 and require users to activate over the internet? 3. Have hardware based solution to check software licensing? Are you using any third party solution or have a custom solution?

modified on Monday, July 13, 2009 11:45 AM

[Dave Parker]

Have done (1), thought about doing (2) and coded most of the bits for it but never actually deployed it, wouldn't bother with (3). Haven't used anything third party but if they were cheaper I'd consider a 3rd party obfuscater.

[Simon P Stevens]

Have done 1 in the past. But it was more to do with feature control than actual licensing. The product was such that it required our guys to get it setup. (Each deployment was heavily customised). And the license key encoded what features would be available for use (and the total number of users the system would allow). It was a pretty simple algorithm and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have taken much to crack it, but that wasn't really the motivation for doing it anyway. It was mainly there to just prevent the clients doing things like using features they hadn't paid for, and going over their user limit (either by accident or deliberately)

Simon

[BRShroyer]

The company I'm working at now uses a third party app, Instant PLUS[^]. It's nice and easy to use. You can set up periodic/trial activations or permanently activate. Plus it has a DLL you can do some thing programatically. It has the internet activation feature, but we don't use it. We require the customer to call us or e-mail us with the activation numbers.

Brad Deja Moo - When you feel like you've heard the same bull before.

[Chris Losinger]

1. custom.

image processing toolkits | batch image processing

[Harvey Saayman]

1. Yes, in my case this contains things like expiry date, max concurrent users, max employees and features available. 2. Nope 3. Not in the form of a dongle no, but my system relies on biometric hardware which we have sole rights for to import into our country. So you have to buy our hardware to use our software. The only 3rd party things we use are the xeno code obfuscator and Install Shield

Harvey Saayman - South Africa Software Developer .Net, C#, SQL you.suck = (you.Occupation == jobTitles.Programmer && you.Passion != Programming) 1000100 1101111 1100101 1110011 100000 1110100 1101000 1101001 1110011 100000 1101101 1100101 1100001 1101110 100000 1101001 1101101 100000 1100001 100000 1100111 1100101 1100101 1101011 111111

[Allen Anderson]

we do #2, our customers seem fine with it. After we implemented #2 our sales per customer went up (they were being more honest about how many peopel were actually using it).

[Giorgi Dalakishvili]

Here is an interesting review of licensing component for .Net: Review: CryptoLicensing for .NET[^]

Giorgi Dalakishvili #region signature My Articles Asynchronous Registry Notification Using Strongly-typed WMI Classes in .NET [^] My blog #endregion