foust@gumby.UUCP (07/15/85)
The company I work for will be marketing a product later this month.
It is a product for professional musicians, and it requires a large
capital investment in other hardware (like synthesizers) to work
effectively. Our market is limited. We don't expect to sell
millions of copies - less than five thousand if all goes perfect,
but probably about a thousand. Our price point will be about $500,
which will probably include an update or two, beyond the telephone
support we expect to give.
We plan on using a dongle to protect the software. We decided a fair
part of our market would be people who _might_ buy our product, and
want to test it out, with a friend's copy of the software.
Now, if we were especially nice and included nice, user-friendly help
screens on disk, without a good protection scheme, that guy would have little
reason to buy the software, and we would have lost a potential sale.
Our dongle costs about $5 to make, and since we write in C, it will be
a little harder for some user, hell-bent on removing the copy protect,
to use debug to remove the dongle-checking code. If he can figure it out,
he can make a dongle for himself.
As much as I love those rules of economics, the price of a dongle doesn't
really matter to the costs of development.
We've had three full-time, three part-time C programmers working on this
product for a year, not to mention several technical writers in the
later stages. One guys spent an afternoon designing the dongle, another
afternoon to make the PC board layout and send it off to a third company
to make in bulk for about $5 each. Well, we've still got to do the
accounting for the dongles, but it doesn't mean a whole lot of investment.
It sure gives a lot of bang for the buck in the land of copy protect.
Now, if we serialize the software, and check it to the dongle, we can
even prevent even more dongle pirates.
Even dongles aren't that hard to crack. Hasn't anybody out there tried?
Or were you guys arguing about something you haven't seen?
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John Foust
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