Ask HN: Do you care about your software being pirated?

4 points by tjosten 11 years ago | 8 comments

During the past weeks, I developed and published a small OS X utility app that sells for ~$3 in the Mac App Store. However, due do French export laws for apps that include encryption mechanisms, the app is not available in the French app store.

(It ships and uses libssh2 and implements SCP over SSH, and therefor does not use "encryption mechanisms that are provided by the operating system" - the registration process for that is all in French and neither Apple nor the French government seems to be able to help with that.)

As I got a bunch of emails asking why the app is not available in the French Mac App Store by now, I thought about offering a non-MAS version of the app. Coming to my initial question, I'm not sure if I want to spend time on implementing any kind of license key check etc., or just offer that version completely without DRM / license checks as it surely will be cracked either way. (The Mac App Store version is available as a torrent for quite some time now, so whoever wants to steal the app will do no matter what I finally do.)

So, I'd like to ask you guys how you handle this, or how you would handle this if you were in my situation? Spend time on implementing a license key check that will be cracked either way, or just offer a non-DRM version that'll sell in France to make everyone happy?

Thanks.

avalore 11 years ago |

For selling outside of the MAS, Paddle is pretty good: https://www.paddle.com/developers

They have a quick to implement SDK that will take care of licensing, payments, etc. Depending on how you want to price your app the 5% + 50c deal could also work out well.

tjosten 11 years ago | |

On the website, they say:

  - Automatic Updates
    Publish updates to your app or game instantly in just 3 clicks.

However, I wasn't able to find any documentation about that feature, same for Crash Reporting. I've written an email, but by any chance you know anything about this?

avalore 11 years ago | | |

I worked on the licensing and IAP SDK's so not 100% about these features. It's a holiday in the UK today so I'm guessing it won't be an instant answer as usual.

I'll ask the question also, if those portions aren't ready yet I'm sure they'll be in the works though.

tjosten 11 years ago | |

This looks actually pretty amazing and might be worth a shot.

zura 11 years ago |

I'd say do some license checking but make it as much as possible user-friendly. Yes, it will be eventually cracked anyway, but do not make things very trivial. For the end user, it should be much easy to pay for the license, than to trivially copy it (without even searching for the crack/torrent).

logn 11 years ago |

For the France export problem, can you just separately provide an install script that will go and download the crypto binaries to dynamically link to?

Also to combat piracy, maybe you can detect pirated copies and then insert a prompt for users to donate, but either way you let them continue using the app. You could add a BTC/Doge donation as I suspect pirates might just not want to use a credit card.

hashtag 11 years ago |

No. It'll happen either way if the app is popular enough.