Re: Protection of intellectual property (Schema & SQL code)

Another approach is to include as part of your service agreement a very
high class Customer Care type of deal at no cost. You present it as

In order for ACME to provide you with best level of service, our products
does periodical and random self examination and maintain a status link with

the mother ship. Our elaborate preventive technologies will inform you of
any updates or potential problems. etc etc etc, you get the idea....

But what you are really doing is testing your customer. If your customer
says,
oh...yeh....what do you mean you randomly check things, and no we don't
want
any messages to be sent out, then you know you have a problem....

There is also another long term way of fixing this....
Next time you see a friend, a causin or coworker asking you for
a copy of some US made software. Tell them I can not let you do
that. Because If this goes on, then someday, somebody would do
that to my product.

Jason Earl wrote:

> wsheldah(at)lexmark(dot)com writes:
>
> > I agree with Jason that you can't really prevent them from getting
> > to the schema, unless you become an Application Service Provider and
> > host the application on your own hardware at your business, and they
> > connect over a network to it. Of course, then you would want to
> > charge them a subscription for continued use of the service, and be
> > prepared to assume responsibility for backups, uptime, etc.
>
> Yes, it is much better to market this sort of thing as a service. A
> competent Systems Administrator would rather be poked in the eye than
> be responsible for a system that they can't back up.
>
> If you want to keep your customers data out of their hands, then the
> least you can do is be resposible for the backups.
>
> > One thing you could do just to "tag" it would be to add a prefix or
> > suffix to all the tables. Say you work for "A Better Company, Inc.",
> > then you might name all your tables things like abc_customer and
> > abc_order, etc. The only thing that would help with is if you find
> > someone else running a copy, it may be easier to prove that it's
> > your schema. Of course they could change the names, but they would
> > run the risk of breaking functionality if they don't do it right,
> > plus you can hardcode the names in your front-end application. If
> > you can compile the front-end such that you only provide them with a
> > binary executable, it will be that much harder to change the
> > names. And you may have better luck using other copy-protection
> > mechanisms with the front end.
>
> If you are going to get mean. Why not simply write your application
> so that it calls home every once in a while. It can then check your
> database to see if its secret serial number is valid, and if it isn't,
> or if there is a duplicate it shuts itself down.
>
> Good luck signing customers up for that sort of a deal.
>
> > I wish you well,
>
> I don't. I hate applications that won't share data. I especially
> hate applications that require some sort of secret handshake to backup
> properly.
>
> As a developer I believe that developers should get paid, but as a
> former systems administrator I also believe that applications that
> make it hard for an admin to do his or her job are evil. There has
> *got* to be a better way to get your customers to pay you.
>
> Jason
>
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Medi Montaseri medi(at)CyberShell(dot)com
Unix Distributed Systems Engineer HTTP://www.CyberShell.com
CyberShell Engineering
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