I'm having trouble designing a software license key system for software I've developed. It's a plugin for a popular IDE and requires a license key to unlock more features.
Currently I just have 10,000 randomly generated licenses and when someone purchases the software, they are sent 1 of the licenses. Now is where I'm confused as to what I should do. Either I have to roll out some sort of server validation system that sends the license key to the server, checks whether it is currently being used, or is valid, etc and throws back either success or faliure.
Does it have to be more complex than this? I don't see any reason to have to generate special keys depending on the user.
You can ask them for some hardware identifier (i'd recommend hdd serial) with the payment, and the license would be the id signed with your rsa key. Serverless and easier solution.
Jacob Long
Wouldn't they not allowed to use the license key on other machines then? I suppose I would have to generate a few keys for them then.
Carson Johnson
Yeah, thats an accidental result, you can let them get a new every x months, or x times.. After all a mediocre-skilled cracker can patch out both the solutions, this is just so that people just can't activate the same key unlimited times and have to actually modify the thing.
Julian Hill
Yea I understand, it sucks how pretty much any software license system can be circumvented. There's only so much you can do (obfuscation pretty much).
It doesn't suck. If you designed a clever way to validate licenses and someone was able to break it he deserves the free copy. Only clever people will crack stuff anyway, let the sheeps pay you.
Matthew Cook
> It's a plugin for a popular IDE and requires a license key to unlock more features Lmao are you serious
Justin Thompson
It should be as simple as generating a bunch of long keys and handing them out, with a bool flag to mark usage... just make sure you write some code to detect someone who's obviously posted their key online for others to use. I wouldn't worry much about sharing between friends but that's up to you.
Charles Reyes
This is a good thing, eventually all a software will be portable, free as in free beer and doesn't phone home regularly. It's a win in my book.
Asher Moore
If the IDE in question is Visual Studio, consider using Microsoft's OAUTH2 services as a way to authenticate your user and see if they are authorized to use your plugin...I think the newer versions of ReSharper do this.
Joshua Bailey
> eventually all a software will be portable, free as in free beer and doesn't phone home regularly
>just make sure you write some code to detect someone who's obviously posted their key online Yeah bruh just write some code easy fix
Daniel Diaz
Should be pretty easy. Assuming it phones home you just have to log the number of unique IPs using the key, and flag the key for inspection if the number passes some threshold.
Jackson Powell
>hey Jow Forums help me be a fucking kike why tho
Brandon Baker
>assuming it phones home Already requires a good amount of code on both the client and server side. And I dont see how setting an arbitrary number of uses would show you which ones have been "obviously" posted online.
Eli Taylor
Licensing is very simple. Include a LICENSE file in the source tree containing the GNU General Public License version 3, with a note that later versions are allowed. For extra protection, include a short notice that the code is GPLv3+ at the beginning of every file.
Asher Garcia
Nah I don't know exactly what he's doing but phoning home could just be a snippet of code that runs on client initialization, and the server endpoint just logs some stuff in a database.
You're right though obviously is the wrong word, it's not obvious. I'd say if you have 20+ IPs using the same key then it's worth looking into. Though it could also just be a guy who uses a VPN.
Grayson Turner
Only real solution in this thread
Nathaniel Nelson
>Jow Forums 2008 >DRM??? Are you seriously going to charge me money for moving electrons across my motherboard?? Why don't you just like rape my mom while you're at it?? We do not dib! We do not dab!
>Jow Forums 2018 >Sure I can help you design your DRM implementation. We need to secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.
Adrian Torres
Yeah seriously. This place has gotten really bad as of late.
