Phone home

Questions related to the distribution, marketing and selling of applications created with NeoBook. (Formally titled: "Making Money with NeoBook")

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dpayer
Posts: 1394
Joined: Mon Apr 11, 2005 5:55 am
Location: Iowa - USA

Phone home

Post by dpayer »

To what degree can a person developing an application assume that their product will be on a network based computer?

If you can assume that, then you could build in a function of the program that would "phone home" to a web application that would recieve a post from the program and verify a registration number.

If the response of the web application affirmed the program, all things would continue normally. If there were a series of negative responses from the webserver (or an algorythm to determine if the code was being entered from multiple geographic locations) over a period of time, not just a non-response from a website, then something could pop up stating: "A licensing violation has occured, please contact our office here - XXX XXX XXXX" or a website, etc.

One of the control panel applications I use on a windows server does this. It checks back to the developer at least every three days to make sure the license is valid. Of course, that program's license is also tied to a specific IP address.

You could also capture machine specific information through a routine in the program. That could be submitted to the post as well, if there were more than one (or whatever threshold of copying you would feel comfortable with) such signature then you would know the app was being shared.

Of course, one could always put in the help/about page:

This product is licensed to:

My Name
myemail@whatever.com
My City, My State.

And let them know that their information would be shared if the program were shared. (hhmmmm..... you could have a function: "If you have forgotten your credit card number, we can email it to you at this address" and see how many would share the program! joke - do not do this!).
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