We have been using a third party trial wrapping solution for a while where I work to give users 15 or 30 day trial versions of our commercial software (the commercial versions are recompiled to use a USB hard key) - however I would like to see what other options are out there for creating trial software. What do you recommend?
A:
Anything but FlexLM. It will get you nothing but instant hatred with the intensity of a thousand blazing suns.
Stu
2008-08-14 16:08:51
+1
A:
A lot of installers have support for licensing like this. Wise has nalperion (http://www.nalpeiron.com/products/) and install anywhere has FLEXnet. I haven't used the former and the latter is, as Stu says, terrible. We actually roll our own licensing since it is easily portable across platforms and we can send people new license keys which extend their trial. It has the added bonus that we can license individual parts of the software differently.
stimms
2008-08-14 16:24:50
A:
I did try nalpeiron with Wise, but had so many headaches in getting past it's licensing just to use it - requiring multiple support calls - that I couldn't subject our customers to that.
We are happy with our commercial licensing protection with a hard lock, but want a simple trial wrapper that will expire after a set amount of time. Most solutions I have encountered are offering full service licensing (FlexLM as one example) that have a work flow of converting the trial into a fully licensed product.
Rob Hunter
2008-08-14 17:32:13
A:
I had a poke around but I couldn't find a nice free open solution. I guess it is a pretty hard problem. Depending on how you implement the license checking it might be easy to break. This is pretty clearly demonstrated by the number of cracks available on the intertubernets. You would have to look at how much your product is worth and decide how heavily you wanted to invest in protecting it. What is worse than somebody stealing your product is somebody installing your product and then having trouble with the licensing. My company won't be renewing our install anywhere license next year because of the trouble we have with it just randomly unregistering itself. Instead we will be building our own installer technology off of one of the open source solutions. That is a good 10k/year they won't be earning from now on.
stimms
2008-08-14 20:29:03
A:
If you're using publishing .NET software, make sure that any licensing package you use is paired with an obfuscation/encryption tool. While nothing is "uncrackable", without it removing license checks from .NET software is rediculously easy. The free edition of Dotfuscator is a joke, but the Pro edition is actually pretty good.
[Commercial Plug] We sell CodeVeil which handles both encryption and obfuscation as an alternative to Dotfuscator[/Commercial Plug]
Paul Alexander
2009-03-24 19:18:14