Stop re-inventing the wheel

This morning I woke up and declared that I will endeavour to use more off the shelf solutions to run my business. I’ll admit I’m somewhat of a control freak and as a developer I think we are a breed of people that like to know how things work and maintain complete control.

The problem as tiny company is I’ve already spent far too much time and money re-writing what is already in abundance on the web. Sorry Jason, I should have taken your advice and now thankfully I have seen the light.

This means the blogging engine I created for tizma.com is not officially defunct and replaced with this WordPress one. If you subscribe to the previous RSS you should be fine as the FeedBurner URL has stayed the same.

Software piracy – a personal case study

CSV Easy was launched in the Summer of 2008. A small tool for a niche market that was never going to be a killer app that everyone wanted or needed. This said, within the data world an invaluable tool in my opinion (biased I know).

We are all familiar with software piracy and as most large vendors will attest to, its an accepted loss on a small scale. It doesn’t matter what copy protection you put in place, there always seems to be a way to circumnavigate such security.

When you’re Microsoft or Adobe this blip in revenue is easily masked by the huge income from legitimate corporate purchases. On the flip-side small businesses really feel the pain financially.

What has shocked me since I released v1.0 back in the Summer is how determined, slick and vast piracy is.

Doing a simple Google for CSV Easy Key Gen returns an alarming half a dozen pages of results. When I first searched I couldn’t believe it. Some hacker had taken the time to write a dedicated key generator for my little application and it worked perfectly. They’d reverse engineered my algorithm without breaking a sweat.

Now you might think “so what”, get a ticket and get in line with every other software vendor. I know asking pirates/hackers to please stop is an utter waste of time, but what I want to highlight are real facts collected by myself, most importantly showing how financially crippling the situation is. So in October 2009 I invested a small amount of time doing two things:

• Requesting a valid email address to be able to download. This way I could log who was allegedly downloading and when.
• When CSV Easy was unlocked with a license code it authenticated it back with my web server to determine if the license was a legitimately purchased one, stopping the user if necessary. I also logged all these attempts to authenticate, if they were good or bad.

Thanks goes to Jason Cohen @asmartbear for inspiring me to make these changes and for his assistance in shaping my companies image to the outside world.

So, I left this process to accumulate statistics until the end of 2009. The following are cold hard facts deduced from this data:

2,657 – Total number of unique requested downloads

589 – Requests determined to be bogus (through bounces and algorithms)

314 – Total number of unique license codes attempted to authenticate with

32 – Total unique licenses that were determined to be valid purchases

This means that around 90% of all authentication attempts were with illegal license codes. With each license costing £24.99 that’s £7,047 in lost revenue. Just calculating this and typing it up makes me feel depressed.

Even more shocking is that some of my customers are using single licenses on multiple machines. Is it just acceptable these days to ignore piracy and abuse software as we see fit. I’m a one man business and I’ve poured years into this software. Is honestly so much to ask for and little bit of money to keep me running?

In conclusion I think we are seeing the death of the licensed desktop software. Open source has taken a sizeable chunk of this and given everyone the taste for free software. I believe the future for Tizma as a business is with on-line subscription based services. Our roots are for the desktop, but its just not going to be commercially viable much longer.

I would love some debate and comments on this subject as it hasn’t been discussed a great deal recently.