>>> The hard part with software licensing is making it resistant to cracking.

You couldn't be further from the truth.

No one is gonna crack your software. There isn't 1% of your customers who could disassemble your software. There isn't 0.1% who could make a crack. Enterprise users don't even run cracked software.

Software licensing is about making as little work as possible to block non paying users. Time spent developing useless counter measures is time not spent selling and developing your product.

A good old key file with only the last payment date will do just fine. Send everyone who didn't pay since last year to your payment page :D

Someone would just NOP out the check and publish a cracked version on the internet, so everyone who can't crack it will be able to download the cracked version.

Maybe for a regular single user who probably wouldn't of bought the product, but in an enterprise company it's a whole other story.

I myself pay for software I know I could of looked up a crack for, but being a developer I know how much effort software development takes I opt to either find an open source alternative or buy the product if reasonably priced. If I can't find a decent alternative and the price is poor, I probably wont use it, whatever it is.

I think the point is that the only way to make your software genuinely resistant to cracking is an onerous DRM scheme like you see with games or obscure engineering software. Stuff that takes a lot of work to implement (or $$ to license) and more importantly actively annoys legitimate users.

Anything short of that is probably going to be cracked for software that is even modestly popular. I think setting the bar just high enough to keep grandma from breaking it is pretty much just as good as something more sophisticated.

The psychology of it is, you can't stop nefarious users ultimately. But you need something that at least makes honest users take some extra action specifically to crack your software. Making them feel like they are pirating something will stop most honest users.

I think it comes down to what is easier, faster and most convenient to do -- download a cracked copy from a bittorrent site or jump through the hurdles of ordering a legitimate copy.

There have been many companies/independent developers who have used the "warez scene" to intentionally "leak" and distribute their software. As the software gains traction they make it easy for the user to buy a license so they can update the software from within the software. Otherwise the user has to wait until a new cracked copy gets released.

You'll never ever stop anyone from cracking your software but convenience does come at a price.

Except the legitimate distribution channel doesn't have to be easier than the illegitimate one, it just has to be easy enough. There are plenty of incentives to use the legitimate channel, all you have to do is not make it too annoying.

I never knew anybody who wasn't able to get around licensing AND downloaded cracks. Cracks are (were? is that still a thing?) just time savers. If you can follow some tutorials on replacing a binary with an edited one, you are brave enough to learn how to edit it yourself.

Also, that user is running some random binary from the internet just not to pay. Without that crack, you would never have had that user.

It depends on who the customers are. We have license checks at my company, and they would be rather trivial to circumvent. But they are there to keep the honest people honest, not to stop a determined adversary.

Just because it is there doesn't mean people will use it, especially when you are creating B2B software. If a company was found using cracked software that would cause big problems for them. It is cheaper for them to just pay for the software.

I sell a niche desktop application to engineering companies. They self-police themselves pretty well - we're really not concerned with them cracking our software at all.

We built our own stupid-simple licensing system. True, it wasn't that hard, but it would totally be worth $100/mo to have this maintained by somebody else, so we could focus only on our product.

Their competition (FlexLM, etc) is horrific. This looks much better.

FlexLM is horrific and does terrible things like stashing data in unused/unformatted areas of your disk as well as dropping litter all over the registry and filesystem. I have to use Tableau which I actually really like but because it uses FlexLM that shit will never touch my bare metal.. VM only.

The part that does this is not FlexLM itself, but safecast with which it is frequently bundled, but many specialized engineering products use only FlexLM without additional DRM layer (FlexLM itself is originally meant for Unix and mostly portable, Safecast is probably Windows-only).

On the other hand many things use FlexLM only to provide node-locking which is thing that it can do, but is to some extent an afterthought. The thing was originally designed to be used over network to provide floating licensing, with some minimal resistance to cheating and cracking.

In fact it seems that it's original author(s) (wikipedia says that the whole "team", but it mostly looks like one guy) got fed up with managment and marketing so much that he went on to implement and sell RLM on their own, which mostly seems like slightly better FlexLM without completely nonsensical features.

>The hard part with software licensing is making it resistant to cracking.

As somebody who has implemented a custom licensing server it becomes a trade off between ease of use, ease of maintainability and resistance to cracking.

>It seems trivial to issue your own license tokens and have clients check in with your website for an OK / BAD response.

It can be trivial if all it does is tell you if a license is valid or not. But when it comes to adding/removing features in the application based on a single license key and also dealing with offline licensing it becomes less trivial. On top of that, you need to make sure your licensing server doesn't go down. It is just as easy to pay to have it taken care of for you.