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How Can Software be Protected from Piracy ?

posted by janrinok on Saturday March 22 2014, @02:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the questions-without-answers dept.

AnonTechie writes:

"Echoing a question asked on programmers.stackexchange.com - How can software be protected from piracy ?

It just seems a little hard to believe that with all of our technological advances and the billions of dollars spent on engineering the most unbelievable and mind-blowing software, we still have no other means of protecting against piracy than a "serial number/activation key." I'm sure a ton of money, maybe even billions, went into creating Windows 7 or Office and even Snow Leopard, yet I can get it for free in less than 20 minutes. Same for all of Adobe's products, which are probably the easiest. Can there exist a fool-proof and hack-proof method of protecting your software against piracy? If not realistically, could it be theoretically possible? Or no matter what mechanisms these companies deploy, can hackers always find a way around it ?"

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 22 2014, @04:30AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 22 2014, @04:30AM (#19611)

    open source it

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 22 2014, @10:21AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 22 2014, @10:21AM (#19656)

    Although "open source" should be "free software" and "piracy" should be "unauthorized copying".

    This is the only way.

  • (Score: 1) by HiThere on Saturday March 22 2014, @07:21PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Saturday March 22 2014, @07:21PM (#19778) Journal

    That's my favorite answer. Actually, I prefer the AGPL3, but any of the GPLs so far is acceptable. So is BSD or MIT, though I'd prefer not to use them. (For some purposed they are really the superior choice, but I'm not trying to implement standards.)

    FWIW, offering code under a GPL license doesn't prevent you from also selling it...though it puts limits on what you can charge.

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.