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Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

If you're serious and "cost is no object", you probably want something dongle based: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongle#Copy_protection

Note that the objective probably isn't something you can't break, but something that raises the bar high enough it's not worth it for any/many of your customers to pay someone to break.

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Some kind of dongle is definitely required, but wouldn't someone be able to read the code to our app, remove the dongle-checking part, and then copy it all they want?

We do have a way to keep the code encrypted until we run it, but we have to ship the key with the code...

so you're shipping the code with the product or is the code the product (website/app)?

Yeah, the code is the product, it's a program to do physical simulations of a certain industrial process (actually more interesting than it sounds!)

and why dont you just ship compiled versions and add some sort of licencing into your program? or does the contract state that you have to give the sourcecode along with the programm (that would make it "some software you built on contract for a company" and not "your product"!)?

The main problem is that we want to do time-based licensing, so they can only use the product for a month or whatever before buying a new license. Anything we do in the program to check that license, they'll be able to edit the program to remove.

Just include an audit clause in the contract which allows you to audit them for licence compliance. Add a comment in the code around the check which says "If you report your employer for illegally using our software we will give you a $10,000 reward anonymously".

That's actually a pretty good idea. :-)

This issue has been addressed for compiled code (don't know anything about IronRuby, though). There are a bunch of tricks, like frequently checking the dongle, decrypting code before using it, etc.

And for a time-based license you'll need a dongle with a clock in it to prevent the simple workaround of setting the clock (and general system state, etc.) back in time.

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