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From: tj@kona.cs.ucla.edu (Tom Johnson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Idea for painless copy protection
Message-ID: <1991Jan29.181440.27832@cs.ucla.edu>
Date: 29 Jan 91 18:14:40 GMT
References: <1991Jan27.144523.20674@phri.nyu.edu> <6871@bgsuvax.UUCP>
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In article <6871@bgsuvax.UUCP> denbeste@bgsuvax.UUCP (William C. DenBesten) writes:
>
>[Comments about LaunchBreak deleted] 
>
>Quickmail has (had) your register the serial number 'feature'.  It is
>the only thing that I really detest about Quickmail.  I have mail
>running on 20 macs.  I dutifully purchased two copies of their program
>(which is licensed for up to 10 macs).  I then added quickmail to my
>prototypical system folder on my server.  Unfortunately, I had to tell
>half of my users to duplicate copy #1 and the other half to duplicate
>copy #2.  This was a big headache.

CE Software fixed this problem with the 2.2.3 version of QuickMail.
We use QM in our 40 machine MacLab (we use LaunchBreak too--I would 
recommend it highly) and we used to have the same problem as William--
mainly having to keep track of which machine has which serial number.
It got to be such a pain that we decided  we would never again use a 
program with that sort of protection again.  QM 2.2.X requires the 
serial numbers to be stored on the mailserver, not on each individual
machine.  The one drawback is that you are now registering the number
of users, not the number of machines, so now we have to have 200 serial
numbers instead of 40.  CE was very generous and allowed us to purchase
the additional 160 serial numbers at a significant discount.

This sounds like something that should be on comp.sys.mac.apps or misc
instead of comp.sys.mac.programmer, but I posted here because I would
like to see other programmers take public labs into consideration when
they design their software. Imagine what it's like to have to use an
Installer application to install software on 40 machines without floppy
drives, with an installer which doesn't work from a file server. Please
take us administrators into consideration when you are programming.  It
seems like I spend a great deal of time with debuggers and disassemblers
trying to fix problems like this (and to try to implement a little
more security than Apple figured we needed :-).

Thanks for listening.

Tom


>
>CE Software and I disagree.  I call this a form of copy protection.
>They don't.  This is yet another case of the copy protection getting in
>the way of legitimate users.
>
>Oh BTW, it is really handy to have a disassembler, resedit and a
>understanding of 68000 assembly, but I don't want to talk about that.
>
>-- 
>William C. DenBesten   is   denbeste@bgsu.edu  or   denbesten@bgsuopie.bitnet


-- 
Tom Johnson             "I put this moment.............................here
tj@cs.ucla.edu           I put this moment......................here
                         I put this moment--
                                              Over here!"        (Kate)