How do I prevent my java application from being copied?
807605Sep 14 2007 — edited Sep 17 2007Hello everybody,
I'm working on an application for a customer who wants to make sure his competitors won't be able to copy the application and use it or distribute it for themselves. Not without some disassembly & hassle anyway (no sony-rootkit level paranoia). And I'm looking for a semi-portable way of doing just that. Semi-portable meaning that it should at least work on all modern Windows versions (2000 and beyond), but it'd be nice if it worked on Linux too.
The application in question will be running on publicly accessible computers (hence the copycat fears) without an Internet connection (making online activation ala WGA impossible) possibly even without an ethernet card at all (so no mac-address based key verification option either). I thought of doing some kind of key validation based on 'lspci' output but I can't get the Windows version of pciutils to build (yet another reason to dislike C).
Anybody have any experience in this area (or just bright ideas) ?
TIA,
Rogier de Groot