Best way to protect my software?

[Adar]

I am starting up my own company together with a professor. A small source of revenue in this company is going to be us selling licenses for a computer program written in C++ that he have developed.

We are going to sell licenses that are to be renewed annually and I am wondering about the best way to make sure that the customer renews his/her license and not just use it illegally. I am too cynical to believe that we can make a super protection but it would be nice if it took a day or two to crack it.

Is there any cheap or free module/wrapper available that can protect the program and force the user to enter a new code each year?

[GrnEyedDvl]

There is all kinds of stuff out there, the problem is that everything out there in the public domain has most likely already been cracked. This is a large reason that companies are hosting the data on their own servers, like Quickbooks does with payroll now.

I have considered this a time or two myself. As you didnt mention what kind of software this is its hard to give a good answer. Is it data driven? If so then you can charge an annual fee and host all the data on your own server. So sure I can install the program, but I cant actually use it without an account at the other end as there is no local database.

Another thing you can do is take a machine ID approach. For each installation generate a unique installation ID, and tie that to the serial number you sold. Periodically the machine the software is installed on communicates with a server and compares the installation ID with the serial number. If things match up, then the software launches. If not, then not. Of course this requires an almost always on internet connection, which a lot of people complain about (Steam, etc).

There are no easy answers on this one, especially if you are going to be distributing this online. If you are only going to distribute it locally by hand, then there are different things you can do, but you also severely limit your customer base.

[Adar]

There is all kinds of stuff out there, the problem is that everything out there in the public domain has most likely already been cracked. This is a large reason that companies are hosting the data on their own servers, like Quickbooks does with payroll now.

Thank you for the reply. I am very cynical about software protection so I would be more than happy to take something from the public domain. The program is a software for statistical evaluation in bioinformatics so the number of users is going to be very limited and the incentive to release cracks minimal so it is mostly about the user feeling that it is easier to pay to renew the subscription than it is to write their own crack.

It is very hard for a person like me to find what's actually good in the public domain so do you have any suggestions on things that might be useful to implement in the program?

[GrnEyedDvl]

I have never used one, so its hard for me to suggest one. You might take a look at these though.

http://activelocksoftware.com/index.html
http://www.google.com/Top/Computers/...cense_Control/