Licensing Scheme Switch

Andy Kim — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 15:43:55 -0800

Announcement

With the release of Tangerine! we moved to a new licensing scheme across all of our applications. If you upgrade Podcast Maker or Voice Candy and all of a sudden find that it thinks that you are not registered and your trial has expired, it is because you need to put in your new license key. We emailed them out ahead of time, but you may not have gotten it for one reason or another. In that case, please go here to retrieve your license.

But... Why?

So why would we go through the eye-poking pain of updating every order in the database, not to mention having to write code that we don't enjoy writing? Well, there are several reasons why it's all justified. With Podcast Maker we wrote code first and asked questions later. Thus, when we were done with the code, we looked to Kagi as the best solution to quickly take the product to market. We had to abandon them to our own custom store eventually, but it was... sufficient... at the time. The attractive thing about Kagi was that they provided us with a ready to go licensing code. We knew that it was a generic solution that is easier to reverse engineer, and we were proven right recently. A leaked license key can be blocked, but a new license key generated by the crackers is a different game altogether.

With the release of Voice Candy we moved to a license file based system while still accepting the old Kagi license keys in Podcast Maker. While it is cool and some people do prefer the convenience of just double clicking a file to register, it proved to be a burden on us support wise. Most of the times, it wasn't even the users' fault or ours. Some email servers classify email as spam more readily if it contains attachments of unknown extensions and others block it altogether. Some email clients such as Eudora do not even allow file extensions longer than 20 characters, rendering the license file useless for the user, and sometimes even turning the user into a mad and angry user.

So in the end, we are back to issuing license keys but generated with our own algorithm. I'm hoping that the crackers will leave us alone for now (uhm... because we are nice guys?), but I get a feeling that that's just wishful thinking.