I dont know what to say. About 3 days ago I released a script to the public. Today I realised, after searching on google that someone had already nulled (removed my protection) and pirated the script.
How do I stop users from pirating the script? It is written in PHP.
Please help or suggest some solutions.
Thank you for your time.
UPDATE By releasing to the public means that I have started selling it to users.
UPDATE My program is priced at only $49. Very reasonable for the functionality it offers. I do not understand how I should stop pirates from pirating my code. The replies which most people have given are rather sarcastic. I was hoping for some good advice. I know there is no silver-bullet. But some techniques which you have used in your PHP programs.
The only real way to prevent piracy is to not give the user the program at all! What I mean by this is have the logic you want to protect remain server side and offer a client interface.
There are a few companies that offer protection services, but these are expensive and can sometimes still be overcome.
If you're worried about this happening again, try obfuscating your code. Here is a free program to do just that on PHP code.
I'm not trying to be sarcastic here: forget about them. Here's my rationale:
You can spend tons of time trying to
prevent pirates from pirating your
stuff, or you can spend the same
amount of time giving your paying
users more functionality.
Extreme copy protection does not give your paying users anything but more
hoops to jump through to use your
application - which might lead them
to get frustrated.
Pirates will pirate your applications
no matter how much time you spend
trying to stop them.
Budget a certain
amount of time to put in basic copy
protection - just enough to keep the
honest people honest.
Most importantly: Don't irritate your paying customers.
They are the ones you need to make
happy.
There's not much you can do.
Be flattered your work was deemed worth the effort!
How do I stop users from pirating the
script?
Do not release sensible source code to the public...
[EDIT] After a few downvotes, I decided to comment on my answer:
Any code that is released public has a chance of being hacked. This is the number one reason why Javascript is not secure. No matter how much you will obfuscate it, compress it or translate it to some random japanese dialect, it is still source code that the user has access to. Hence it should not contain any sensible information such as passwords or such. All sensible data should be stored in the server side where it is kept hidden from the user.
If you are releasing a php framework containing both the server and client code; then you have no way of fully protecting yourself. PHP is, like Javascript, an interpreted language. You may translate it, compress it, or obfuscate it as much as you want, (and it's probably the best thing you can do) you will never fully protect it when released to the public.
Again... If there was a magic way to prevent code from being broken, it would have been known for a long time. No-cd patches / cracks for new games/softwares now are almost released the same day as the softwares themselves. It is, as noted by Paul, a form of flattery for you, even though I understand how sorry you may feel.
There are a few instances where programmers ended up with bullet-proof protection, but it usually involved high-end engineering.
With PHP, you're mostly out of luck. It's an interpreted language, which means that you are essentially forced to give away the source code. Sure, there are obfuscators (tools that "scramble" the source code to make it near impossible to read for humans), but they can be circumvented as well.
There are product like Zend Guard which seem to offer a better level of protection, but from my understanding, your customers need Zend Guard installed as well, which is almost never the case.
There are several methods of handling this:
Offer your product as a service. This means finding appropriate hosting in the cloud, etc. This removes access to your code base, thus preventing direct piracy. Someone can still reverse engineer your stuff, but I'll touch on that later.
Add a unique identifier to each version of the script sold. This can be done automatically, and is great to do with obfuscated code (another, complementing method). This will give you the ability to track whoever pirated your code. If you can track them, you can sue them (or worse).
Pursue legal action. You'll need to know who leaked the code in the first place for this. Their PayPal information or even an IP address should be enough. You go to your lawyer, ask him to get a court order telling PayPal/ISP to release the identity of the thief, and then start tracking them down. If they're located overseas, your only real option is to freeze/appropriate funds from PayPal/credit card. Banks will be sympathetic only if they have a branch in your country (which can be targeted for legal action).
Ignore it, and simply build your business model around the support that you offer.
The sad fact is that information cannot be secured completely. There is no way to prevent a team of Indian programmers from reverse engineering your program. So you just have to be better than them, and constantly improve your product (this is "A Good Thing (TM)", so do it anyways)
Also keep in mind that DRM and other solutions are often controversial, and will reduce your sales (especially among early-adopters). On a personal level, I would suggest viewing this as a compliment. After all, your script was useful enough that someone bothered to pirate it within a week!
PHP is easily decoded, so for people who really want to know, it's easy to find out the source code. However, there are certain obfuscator programs such as this one that'll make your PHP script almost unreadable for those trying to decode it.
What kind of protection did you think you had added to a PHP script, anyway? You should add a line of the form:
if ($pirated)
exit();
and then make it mandatory (in the licence agreement) that users set the $pirated variable accordingly.
Forget trying to prevent it
Go the way of CakePHP (see sidebar on front page) and many other open source projects and ask for donations.
People actually do it!
Contact the pirate and let h{im,er} know that you will be forced to take legal action against them if they do not abide by the license.
I agree with #Michael.
Try ionCube or Zend Guard. They are both commercial offerings, but you say that you are selling your software so it might be worth it. Although nothing is foolproof and can be reverse engineered with enough effort and technical skill, these solutions are probably good enough for the average PHP script vendor.
I agree with Samoz's suggestion to keep the logic server side, however this can often be hard to do. The best strategy is to make the user want to buy it by offering updates automatically to registered users, as well as installation, advice and good support. You are never going to sway people hell bent on pirating, however your goal should be to persuade those who are undecided as to whether to pirate or purchase the script.
Any obfuscation/decryption technique for PHP can be cracked
Jumping in very late to this conversation, but saw this question featured. Nobody mentioned contacting a lawyer and pursuing litigation. You likely saw the script on a server - hosted by a known hosting company - you can probably get a DMCA takedown to have the script removed. If you really press the case, you may be able to sue for damages.
Found this link to assist in going this route:
http://www.keytlaw.com/Copyrights/cheese.htm
You could always pirate it yourself to the internet and hope that any nuller will think "its already been grabbed" so don't bother. But pirate a real buggy version. When users come to you looking for help you'll know they have a pirate version if they question you about specific bugs you purposely added and you can approach them accordingly
If your script won't consume a lot of bandwidth, you could keep your "logic" server-side, as samoz suggested, but if your users won't use it responsively ( a crawler, for example ), this could be trouble.
On the other side, you could become a ninja ...
Attach a copyright notice to it. Some companies will actually care that they're using software properly.
Actually I think it's easier to protect PHP scripts than desktop software, because with latter you never know who is running the cracked copy.
In case of PHP on the other hand, if people run your software on public web servers, you can easily find them and take them down. Just get a lawyer and turn them in to the police. They could also be breaking DMCA laws if they remove your protection so that gives you even more ammunition.
Technical way to protect your code is obfuscation. It basically makes your code unreadable like binaries in compiled languages (like Java). Of course reverse engineering is possible, but needs more work.
In general it's hard to prevent users from stealing code when the program is written in a scripting language and distributed in plain text. I've found that http://feedafever.com/ did a really nice job of being able to sell PHP code but still give the code to users.
But the solution to your problem is very dependent on the domain of your program. Does this script run on the users machine with no internet connection? Or could this be a hosted service?
I'd also suggest looking at some of your favorite software, and seeing how they convinced you to pay for it initially. The issue I find isn't always "how can I prevent my users from stealing my software" but sometimes more "how do I convince my users that it's in their best interests to pay me". Software piracy often comes when your product is overpriced (Ask your friends what they would pay for a software package like the one you are selling, I've found that I have historically overpriced my software by 20%).
Anyway, I hope this helps. I'm glad that you are trying to create software that is useful to users and also not incredibly crippled. I personally of the mind that all software that isn't shrink wrapped or SAAS should be free, but I totally understand that we all need to eat.
The trick is not to try to prevent the piracy (in the long term, this is a losing battle), but to make the legitimate version of your product more accessible and/or more functional than the pirate versions.
"Making it more functional" generally means providing involves additional features or services to registered users, which cannot be replicated for free by the pirates. This may be printed materials (a users manual, a gift voucher, etc), services such as telephone support or help setting the product up, or online extras within the software.
I'll point out that companies such as RedHat are able to make significant amounts of money selling open source software. The software itself is freely available -- you can download it and use it for free without paying RedHat a penny. But people still pay them for it. Why? Because of the extra services they offer.
"Making it more accessible" means making it easier to get your legitimate software than a pirate copy. If someone visits Google looking for your software and the first result is a pirate download site, they'll take the pirate copy. If the first result is your home page, they're more likely to buy it. This is especially important for low-cost software: pirated software may be 'free', but usually it takes more effort to get. If that effort is outweighed by the low cost and lack of effort of simply buying it legitimately, then you've won the battle.
I saw anti-piracy working once only. Quantel EditBox systems (a post-processing video solution), Hardware+Software+Internet solution against Piracy. Workstation only works after checking if the bank received the monthly rent. If not, workstation was locked. Funny days when this happens... (Funny days for me, no work at all... No funny day for the hacker.)
Well, PHP is far away from hardware solutions... so I guess your only real choice is a server side protected against a tiny unsafe client pushing content, as pointed in some answer yet.
piracy != copyright infringement
There are known routes to litigate copyright infringers.
Does it really matter enough to hire a legal team?
Obfuscation do add something. It will not be fun to try to modify your code at least even if they can take the first version of it. In best case they will try to find some open source project that does something similar. Guess this would give you an fast fix at least for your problem?
Related
This question already has answers here:
Closed 12 years ago.
Possible Duplicates:
IE6: To support or not to support.
Should we support IE6 anymore?
I'd hate to (HATE TO) admit it, but there are some people still using this browser. A client of mine is facing an issue where the "transparency" area of a png comes out a light grey - ONLY on IE6.
I know it's an unsupported browser, but some people STILL use it. I'd love to have a little discussion about whether or not I should choose to support it.
One point pro-support of IE6 is that often in large organisations, the update of systems is often unimportant to their IT department, so theres a large proportion of people working in these organisations that still use IE6. Schools are the same.
One point con-support of IE6 is that Microsoft no longer offer support for it, and it is considered a defunct browser, so why should I waste my time catering for it.
It is a little bit of a dilemma. I'd love to hear other peoples responses to this.
One point con-support of IE6 is that
Microsoft no longer offer support for
it, and it is considered a defunct
browser, so why should I waste my time
catering for it.
Because it's not Microsoft you're catering for, or people who consider it a defunct browser, it's people using the browser, aka your customers. By all means, don't take on customers who have a requirement that you support IE6 with websites you produce, that is your chocie. But if you're getting paid for it, I'd hardly call it "wasting my time" =)
For my own sites I do not bother with being pixel perfect and having identical functionality in IE6 but I do like to make sure that the site is accessible and functional at a basic level. That shouldn't be too hard and it'll probably be useful for web crawlers as well.
I don't see an alternative. In fact, I dare say it wasn't very professional of you to put a commercial site up that doesn't support IE6. Your site should work on all browsers - cross browser compatibly is part of our job.
In reply to the comments, here's what I mean when I say professional:
It is expected of you to know IE6 is going to be a problem before you start.
Target supported browsers must be part of the contract. Before working on the site you should ask who will be the target crowd and make that decision together. If you need to support IE6 your cost estimation should be higher.
It is expected of you to at least test the site or all browsers (yes, including IE6, knowing that it isn't quite dead yet - you don't have to like it though).
IE6 doesn't support PNGs, has weird box model (so don't use width+padding), etc etc... Every time I consider using a PNG, I take a note - this wouldn't work in all browsers. You are expected to know that or find it in the test you've made.
Full disclosure - the site doesn't look or behave exactly the same on all browsers? When you present the site, explain how and why, and how it will effect end users. This may sound silly, but if you don't have IE6 in your contract, your client may not be too savvy. Your client is going to find out eventually the site doesn't work on IE6 - most likely when the site breaks for of her friends or clients, making her look bad. That knowledge better come from you.
I agree, making web sites display correctly in IE6 is tiresome. Being a web developer for a multinational pharmaceutical company I would know, they are still required to use IE6.
But there's another point to this. If we, the web developers as a group, continous to cater for IE6 then the large organizations have no reason to upgrade. Are we then responsible for people using IE6?
At our firm we have decided not to support IE6 in the administration part of our CMS, but we do cater for IE6 to the public eye.
The client mentioned earlier runs an old version of our CMS and is so stuck there although we and the administrators are willing to upgrade. In other words: Stuck between a rock and a hard place.
It depends who you expect to use the website.
Some recent figures for use of IE6 in different places make interested reading.
If your client still uses IE6, then you are probably going to have to give in (or convince them of their evil ways). Otherwise it might be worth explaining the numbers involved and the additional cost to cater to them - if it takes x hours of your time, does your client really want to pay for that?
Count yourself lucky you're not trying to cater for the Chinese internet user-base...
I make the site work in IE6, but have a banner that comes down pleading with the user to upgrade to experience the awesomeness of this century.
Example page that shows the banner
My opinion is that the site has to be USABLE.
Eye-candy is good, and should be given to as many users as possible but, the question is: does the gray background of the image render the site impossible to use?
Supposing you have a substantial IE6 user base, are these users really complaining about that?
Or do you have 1 person out of the 100 that use IE6 complaining?
Now people say that the clients pay and you have to do what they say etc etc... Well, it's YOUR role to TEACH the client why IE6 should NOT be supported anymore.
Show them that:
1) the site WORKS (i.e. you can read content, submit forms etc), so the IE6 users will be able to use it
2) you can put some "hints" like "you have a crappy browser, don't complain if websites suck with that" (maybe in a slightly more polite way)
3) show them that even Internet giants dropped support for IE6. Why should you keep it? Do you really want to live in the past?
Depends on your user base and would need to be agreed with your client. For an intranet type application you may be able to avoid it. For public applications - government, banking websites, anything the public may rely on, you need to consider it still.
For more luxury type sites, e.g. 'brochure-ware' for a small business, you may be able to take a call on this, but again depends on your client's requirements - do they want to potentially turn away some business? If you can make it fail gracefully (i.e. still looks ok in IE6, but with less bells and whistles), then you have more chance of selling this.
How much money do you earn from the customers who still use IE6?
How much resistance is there within those companies to upgrade from IE6?
How much money will it cost you to support IE6?
We are software developers. We make tools to make life easier for people ("users").
If a user of your software is using IE6, and you refuse to offer that user support until he/she upgrades to a newer web browser, are you making life easier or harder for them?
I'm actually not asking this question rhetorically, believe it or not. It may be that for you to support an older browser takes away too much of your time, keeping you from developing features that would be of greater benefit to the user.
My point is that you need to ask yourself what is best for the user, not whether catering to someone who's using an old version of a piece of software (who isn't?) is somehow beneath you.
I like this approach: http://morten.dk/blog/ie6-tax-now
Normally I would say that IE6 and IE7 is not supported by default, but the client can pay an extra price for supporting legacy browsers (the website will cost 30-50% more depending on the website requirements).
It might be also a good idea to get information from similar sites. One of our newest deployed site has 2-3% IE visitors (including all IE versions), and the IE6 and IE7 users are below 1%. So we decided not to support IE 6 and 7 at all (we don't test them), and we give full functional support for IE 8 (the site is usable, and looks OK, but it isn't as sexy as in a modern browser with a better CSS3 support, which means that there aren't any gradients or rounded elements). But this site is a little special case.
So I say that analyze what kind of people will visit your site, and make a decision based on that information.
I've never understood the idea that this is some sort of "ethical" issue.
If it's around a client then it's a commercial issue.
If your contract says that the site you've developed will support IE6.0 then yes, you should support it.
If it doesn't it's up to him to work out whether he wishes to pay you more to fix any issues that come up with it.
(If it's not specified then you need to make sure you specify it in your next contract otherwise you're open to requests to support anything your client fancies).
In terms of whether it's worth him supporting it, it will depend on his market. I previously worked for a travel firm whose core client base was people who were aged 40+ which 12 months ago was still registering 30 - 40% IE6.0 usage. In that instance IE6.0 support for their site is critical but obviously each site has a different user demographic and that will dictate your approach.
But an approach based on "principal" is unlikely to be the right way to go, you need to have specific commercial or technical issues which mean that the cost of supporting the browser is greater than the cost of not supporting it.
This is a great discussion. My customers are car dealers and while IE6 useage is declining, it is still 12.5% of my traffic. I have actually seen PC's running Win98 in these stores. Amazing!
We've segmented our catalog product into different interfaces for them to pick from. We're getting ready to launch a new one and we're close to making the decision that it will not support IE6. They can still choose one of the others that still do, and we will continue to support those but not enhance them.
So I can finally embrace sprites and transparencies and ... :)
You can't make a horse drink the water, but you can sure as hell lead him to it. What's the point of going forward in browser technology with advanced engines like Webkit and Gecko, if we still allow stupid, uninformed users to visit our websites in IE6 without any interruption?
Then all web standards are redundant and we can just go ahead and make browser-specific websites, which ultimately will become online applications. I would say, educate your user, after all, if you don't, who is going to do it?
We have made a conscious decision here at our design studio to alert IE6 browser-users that their browser is too old and that they should upgrade. We have not encountered any problems so far.
One should take into account that if you are hired to develop specific IE6 web applications, then you really don't have a choice in the matter, but if you are part of a design studio developing forward moving websites implementing new technologies or advanced Javascript, then I would say forget about IE6.
After all, the internet is full web developer handiwork and if we decide it's over, then the revolution will come.
// edit
If you want to make stuff a little easier for yourself, using CSS, start using BrowserDetect.js CSS browser detection. It's initialised using jQuery and simply adds a browser-specific class to your body tag on load.
In other words, if you're running Safari 5, your body tag will look like this:
<body class="browserSafari browserSafari5">
This enables you to create browser specific CSS styles without any hacking of sorts.
That was my last 2c.
I didn't see this point anywhere above, but I apologize if I missed it.
It's interesting that you say ethical, because I think moving standards for technology forward is one of those responsibilities that we have as consumers and as developers. Moving towards SVG and HTML5 and CSS3 is really good for the industry, because it means more efficiency and a better, faster web.
It may not be best for the client if their site doesn't support IE6, but if developers move on from outdated technologies en masse, it forces the last users of those technologies - in this case, businesses and schools and stegosauri with IE6 - to update their browsers, which is not a negative thing. It's OK to make decisions for the good of the industry as a whole, and we should more often.
It really depends who will be using your app! If your client is the UK gov, then yes, you had better develop for IE6 as it's the only browser in use (due to legacy systems that will ONLY work in IE6)
If on the other hand your client all use Safari, then no you don't have to bother.
Users will not stop using IE6 if all websites still work perfectly with it as they then have no reason to change.
This is bit of a "deadlock" which can only be broken if applications stop supporting IE6
Make the users aware that they are using an unsafe and out-dated software, e.g. with something like:
This webpage will not work (well)
with IE6 because that browser is
insecure and no longer supported
Most of the time you can also convince the customer by explicitely stating how much it will cost to support and maintain the application for an unsupported browser. This will usually be a significant amout for any non-trivial website...
The question really is how much degradation do we make IE6 users tolerate? My feeling is: quite a bit. I'd much rather this minority took the pain instead of holding back everybody else. Since our sites are all (naturally) semantically marked up and pass accessibility guidelines, they will make sense and work just fine with styles and javascript disabled. So the simple answer is to give IE6 users the old Netscape 4 treatment and disable all CSS and js for them.
I would definately suggest customer to upgrade with following points.
Technically no updates are provided by Microsoft for IE6, if they do not upgrade their browser, they should be made aware of all security issues they have left open by not upgrading, such mild threats do work and its right as well. Plus you can certainly recommend firefox, as Microsoft never completely implemented html standard and in large organizations, standard, compliance and security these are always considered as big things and you can certainly point towards them and get your update done.
No.
I have a client that requires for his pages to work in Netscape Navigator because he uses it.
That doesn't mean that I should prepare all my pages for last historical version Netscape Navigator.
I've finally found a client for my hosted software - the first time I've ever sold software. I want both parties to sign a contract specifying things like expected uptime, payment schedules, etc., so that no one feels like they've been cheated, but I'm not a lawyer and can't really afford one right now. Does anyone know how to start with this process?
TIA.
When writing a legal agreement of that type, it is hard to give any other answer than "get a lawyer."
Repeat exactly what you have just said to us to your customer. Start a conversation, and take it from there.
In my experience, they will likely appreciate your openness and desire to make sure all parties interests are protected.
If they are large, they may have contracts/SLAs that you can use as a template, and if they are small they may agree to settle for some very simple terms. There are also many templates on the internet available for a small charge.
But as Robert says, you really shouldn't sign anything legally binding without some input from a qualified solicitor. Further, it can't be your run of the mill high street lawyer either. You really need somebody that deals with software/SLA's on a regular basis. Sadly in my experience these people are never cheap.
Allen
As I'm starting to develop for the web, I'm noticing that having a document between the client and myself that clearly lays out what they want would be very helpful for both parties. After reading some of Joel's advice, doing anything without a spec is a headache, unless of course your billing hourly ;)
In those that have had experience,
what is a good way to extract all
the information possible from the
client about what they want their
website to do and how it looks? Good
ways to avoid feature creep?
What web specific requirements
should I be aware of? (graphic
design perhaps)
What do you use to write your specs in?
Any thing else one should know?
Thanks!
Ps: to "StackOverflow Purists" , if my question sucks, i'm open to feed back on how to improve it rather than votes down and "your question sucks" comments
Depends on the goal of the web-site. If it is a site to market a new product being released by the client, it is easier to narrow down the spec, if it's a general site, then it's a lot of back and forth.
Outline the following:
What is the goal of the site / re-design.
What is the expected raise in customer base?
What is the customer retainment goal?
What is the target demographic?
Outline from the start all the interactive elements - flash / movies / games.
Outline the IA, sit down with the client and outline all the sections they want. Think up of how to organize it and bring it back to them.
Get all changes in writing.
Do all spec preparation before starting development to avoid last minute changes.
Some general pointers
Be polite, but don't be too easy-going. If the client is asking for something impossible, let them know that in a polite way. Don't say YOU can't do it, say it is not possible to accomplish that in the allotted time and budget.
Avoid making comparisons between your ideas and big name company websites. Don't say your search function will be like Google, because you set a certain kind of standard for your program that the user is used to.
Follow standards in whatever area of work you are. This will make sure that the code is not only easy to maintain later but also avoid the chances of bugs.
Stress accessibility to yourself and the client, it is a big a thing.
More stuff:
Do not be afraid to voice your opinion. Of course, the client has the money and the decision at hand whether to work with you - so be polite. But don't be a push-over, you have been in the industry and you know how it works, so let them know what will work and what won't.
If the client stumbles on your technical explanations, don't assume they are stupid, they are just in another industry.
Steer the client away from cliches and buzz words. Avoid throwing words like 'ajax' and 'web 2.0' around, unless you have the exact functionality in mind.
Make sure to plan everything before you start work as I have said above. If the site is interactive, you have to make sure everything meshes together. When the site is thought up piece by piece, trust me it is noticeable.
One piece of advice that I've seen in many software design situations (not just web site design) relates to user expectations. Some people manage them well by giving the user something to see, while making sure that the user doesn't believe that the thing they're seeing can actually work.
Paper prototyping can help a lot for this type of situation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_prototyping
I'm with the paper prototyping, but use iplotz.com for it, which is working out fine so far from us.
It makes you think about how the application should work in more detail, and thus makes it less likely to miss out on certain things you need to build, and it makes it much easier to explain to the client what you are thinking of.
You can also ask the client to use iplotz to explain the demands to you, or cooperate in it.
I also found looking for client questionnaires on google a good idea to help generate some more ideas:
Google: web client questionnaire,
There are dozens of pdfs and other forms to learn from
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I'm currently a developer at my first job right out of college. I work for a large company, and the trend I notice with them is that they tend to go with more expensive, closed source software about 99% of the time, while there are perfectly good open source alternatives that are available, most of which are vastly superior to their closed-source counterparts. For example, we use this absolutely awful source control software that cost a ton of money, while there are quite a few open source and/or free options that in my experience, albiet limited, are much better and offer basically the exact same functionality.
I guess my question is: How would an experienced developer approach management about using more free software?
It appears there is another question very similar to this that did not show up when I made this one: How can I convince IT that F/OSS software isn't evil?
EDIT: Just come clarification. I'm not necessarily trying to change the company's procedure, I'm looking for advice on how to approach management about the subject.
Start using it in small utilities and things which are throwaway and don't need management buyin. This can prove the worth of an open source solution and put a crack in
the door for using it in other
projects.
Present articles from trade magazines showing that other people are using the open source solution.
Go with products which have commercial support options, such as MySQL, which enterprises seem to have an easier time swallowing.
Pick your battles carefully. Wait until they are suffering. If they are happy with what they have, they will not switch, no matter how much cheaper or superior the alternative is. You need to catch them while they're trying to think of ways to save money, or while they're disgusted with the problems of the current system.
Be very careful with what you refer to as free. There is a very large corpus of products that would be perfectly valid for a student to use without paying that an enterprise would have to pay for. Also never forget Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). A lot of relatively expensive software is expensive because you get things like configuration and help support for them whereas that may not be the case for free software.
I think you are not asking the right question. To me, the challenge is to have my Big Corp to buy the BEST softwares for me, be it free softwares or not.
Paying for Windows or paying for Linux is not important (what is 100 $ for a Big Corp ?).
But having things done better is really important.
I think that your request to your boss should not be : "Hey, it's free and it's as good as XYZ, why are we using XYZ ?"
Why you boss would risk something trying the product you told when XYZ seems to be ok ?
It would be much more better to ask : "Hey, here is what I cannot do with XYZ : (your list). With my product, I would be able to do that and much more so fast than I would have a lot of spare time to test our own software !".
Small money is usually not a show stopper. Being able to work faster in order to do much more testing (or any other things that could help your boss have a better image) is definitely an excellent argument !
Best wishes,
Sylvain.
I work in a big company that has recently moved into being more enthusiastic about open source solutions. There have been a few big hurdles:
Customer won't support it - we're defense contractors. We do almost nothing without customer say-so. As the customer's opinions have changed we've been able to change our architectures and tool usage. That said, there are still scenarios were open source is unacceptable and we don't use it.
No tech support = scary - in several cases, it's been possible to make the point that open source may not have a single point of company tech support, but it does have huge communities that will support questios for free, and that there are consultants available as needed for the really hard stuff. Plus many, many releases of new versions for bug fixes. And, several competing expensive products have not been able to service tech support needs. Being able to point to specific internal examples with long. well documented, histories of support problems, has been key.
Fear of security issues - we had to develop a process for scrutinizing and controlling every peice of open source introduced. We've managed to find criteria for what we deem risky, versus what we deem relatively benign based on info-sec policy.
Fear of lawsuit - Being large, and profitable, we fear lawsuits, we're great targets. We now have a process for the legal team to scrutinize every open source license. This has proved to be a win - since the legal team now has briefings on every major version of the typical open source licenses, and they can quickly review most stuff.
Version control - fear that if those wacky developers can just download anything they like the world will self destruct. OK, well, practically speaking, the concept of "how do we know what's in a given product" - being able to show a FOSS version control process that is managed internally has been important.
It was definitely a slow process - small projects proved profitable and customers started encouraging it in proposals. That made it useful for executive management. It's helped that those that support it have been williing to put in some extra time to making the business case in terms of efficiency/cost savings, and have been willing to negotiate repeatedly with various parts of the corporate infrastructure.
Making open source work has taken the effort of IT, the info security folks, the legal team, the procurement team, and technical management. Knowing that before you talk to your manager is probably a key to success.
There's also some political savy - for a first project, don't encroach on any sacred cows - ie, those projects that may not be successful, but are high profile and owned by someone with lots of political power. Instead, choose some wacky new thing that isn't available right now and prove the cost savings in a way that is unlikely to provoke a defensive reaction.
When you try to introduce open source software to a big company (or even a small one, in many cases), the biggest counter-argument you're going to hear is "There's no tech support." Companies tend to be wary of using software that's supported by the community, because there's no guarantee (or in some cases, service agreement) that questions about the software will be answered within a reasonable time frame, or at all. In many cases, you can find a company that will provide support for the open-source package you want to use (for example, Red Hat does this for its Linux distribution, even though the contents of the distribution is mainly open source). Showing management a business entity that can support the software will often go a long way.
The other counter-argument to using open source software that I've heard the most often is "Open source software is buggy." This is a tough one; this opinion is pretty ingrained in some corporate cultures. Two possible responses are "The open-source community fixes bugs quickly" and "Since we have the source code, our engineers can fix bugs"--but that's often not what managers want to hear.
So, in essence, it depends on the company, their attitudes, and how much they trust you to make business-critical recommendations. I've used all of the arguments above with different levels of success in different companies.
Of course, in these economic times, the "free" part may go a long way. :-)
"Free software" doesn't necessarily mean your company is going to get software for free. Many successful open-source projects are also offered with licenses and services that cost real money and are geared to organizations that want or need to be assured of good support. MySQL is an example
The reason for a lot of big companies using closed software is that they can call support and the vendor will issue a hotfix, patch or cumulative update
Changing a large company's habits are often like turning an Oil tanker around... it takes a long time and uses a lot of energy.
If the company were in the process of evaluating the purchase of new software for a specific task, Then I would make sure to write a concise opinion memo about why my choice is better.
If the software is something I would use personally and not a server product that multiple developers are forced to use, then I would just ask my manager to use it.
If the software is in place, does the job (even if I don't like the way it does it), i'd learn as much as I can about it to give it as much chance of work for me, or at least make my life easier. If it still sucks really bad, I probably wouldn't try to change it until it was time for the company to pay for an upgrade.
If the software works but is just annoying... I'd do as above, learning all there is to know about it just to make my life easier and then deal with it.
You're probably right that the system you'd recommend is better than the one currently in place. But like some other posters said, choose your battles, especially when this is your first job out in the real world. You may become expendable quickly.
It's not really so much a matter of what's better, even if your way IS better, it's a matter of the culture and the way things are done and the cost of switching. Even if, hypothetically, their system can be magically transported to your OSS system, with no loss of data, dates, records, or anything, you're still going to have people who say "I liked the old way better."
Remember: Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want. I know it may sound glamorous to be "the new guy who recommended a great new versioning system that everybody loved", but you also could just as easily become "that hotshot who insisted on a new versioning system that everybody hated." It's a much smarter career move to just play by the rules at least for a little while until you have some clout and can make some recommendations. In the meantime you may even learn why the old system is preferred, or learn to like it more the more you use it.
I know what you mean. It took us years to convince our managers that everything would be okay if we moved away from using Interbase (a commercial Relational DB) to it's opensource counterpart Firebird. Mostly it was fear of no support that blocked the move. I think the factors which changed their mind were:
tests showing better performance
that there are companies that provide and charge for supporting the OS alternative
constant pushing of the argument by passionate developers
I think cost savings would have played a part if our company were paying for the site licenses but in fact our customers were.
I look at this question like this. I work with the .NET framework. I could ask my employer to migrate to PHP. This is a disadvantage to me, as well as my company, for many reasons. Let's start with the obvious.
1.) I know PHP, but can do much more, and a lot faster, with .NET.
2.) Paying for a service, usually ensures a better experience. The Visual Studio IDE is second to NONE when developing an application.
3.) I can develop an application much faster in VS than hard-coding PHP.
4.) This is the most important one. If I work with a big company, I want my programmers to develop my app faster, and I expect it to run faster. PHP (an example Open Source language) is fast, and reliable, but if I can spend the money, I'll deploy ASP.NET.
Basically, big business, or even small business, wants to spend their money, as long as it's for a good reason. Your best bet is to say, 'Hey, if you want to deploy ASP.NET (or whatever), send me for some training. Then I'll be able to develop OUR application to my best ability'.
not to sound totally cynical, but:
an experienced developer probably would not approach management about something like this, unless he/she was already an expert with the open source package. Companies like to have a phone number to call and someone to blame when things don't work. Free open source packages do not provide this kind of 'accountability' (yes we know it's a joke, but management doesn't)
it is unlikely that management is going to listen to someone fresh out of college about any major purchasing or technology decision. You have to learn the business and earn everyone's respect first. [sorry!]
Same problem everywhere. Once an organization gets beyond a certain size (e.g., the Dunbar number) it starts to show a certain woodenheaded quality that will confound you. Lots of history, people, agendas that you aren't aware of. And getting everyone to agree on your solution is difficult.
Best to start locally. See if you can persuade your manager or PM to use SVN or CVS or GIT locally for a project and then get it to diffuse.
But that situation is true where I work as well. I use SVN locally for myself, but a commercial product for integrating with others.
Companies will use whatever will ultimately make them the most money. That means whatever software will make their employees more productive. If there is a particular piece of open source software you think they should use then when the time comes to purchase the software to do job X then as long as you can prove it will make the employees more productive and they are able to get reliable support just a phone call away as with commercial software then they will use it.
Big companies need to hire support staff for stuff like that. When they purchase software from a company, they are guaranteed support with the contract. Open source projects can die off a lot easier, whereas a large software vendor can be held responsible for much greater periods of time.
Every company has a culture, and fighting the culture can be something of an uphill battle. But if you're willing to try:
you'll likely have more luck getting BSD and BSD-like projects approved (MIT license, Apache, Boost, etc.); and it doesn't matter if most of the arguments against GPL and LGPL are mainly FUD
you should refer to the projects as "royalty-free"
you should make sure things are approved by somebody that can approve them (your direct manager) because putting the company in a bind -- especially when you're new -- (even if the "bind" is only in their head) is not conducive to long-term employment
you can probably go a long way by simply asking what the procedure is to choose a library or tool
From a configuration management perspective, having developers add free software stuff willy nilly whenever they feel like is a serious PITA to manage.
I've worked at companies where you were allowed to do it whenever you wanted and others where you could never do it.
There's definitely a balance to be found but if you're in a larger company with multiple projects, you do have to keep in mind that each time you add a new 'tool' it complicates the build process.
We have a very small, specialized user base.
No community.
My boss wants to find out who is using it. And his approach is to simply make a hidden connection, maybe an auto update function, enabled by default WITHOUT notification when there is no update ...
I don't really like the idea and try to come up with something different.
There is a registration, then you can download a free trial. No other limitations, but the time limit.
Sold licenses are usable across an ip-range - universities.
So the registration and licensing itself is no indicator of usage. Not to speak of that the devs have no feedback about sold licenses whatsoever.
I would like to have some advice how you would, or better have actually, approached a problem like this.
"Simply call home" to notify you that someone is using your software is probably not a good idea, indeed : users don't tend to like that. And it can be bad for the reputation of your company/software.
A solution would be having some kind of good reason to "call home" ;-)
For instance, what about some kind of auto-update-mecanism ? That users could disable, of course, if they want (so not 100% percent efficient) ; but most won't disable it.
And it's really a good idea of reason to do a request to your server :-)
Just don't send anything that could identify the user ; some unique-id key, maybe (to make a distinction between users), but that cannot be used to identify a user ?
I don't like when software I use say to people "hello, this guy is using me!", but I really like the auto-update feature in Firefox, for instance... Event if it says I'm using the software ;-)
This is extremely subjective, and I'd strongly suggest you go and ask some of your actual users how they feel about it, instead of a bunch of opinionated programmers (unless your program is oriented towards programmers who frequents stackoverflow.com). If you make clear it's anonymous, light-weight, and your users like your program to begin with, maybe they'll be just fine with contributing data to build a better version. But there's no other way to know, then to simply ask them.
Concealing (to use a loaded phrase) your activities under some unrelated pre-text seems highly disingenuous.
If you're selling to anywhere that might have a competent IT setup, like a university, then I wouldn't even think about a sneaky don't-tell-them route. If you do, you're lining yourself up for bad publicity as soon as someone's firewall spots the unexpected connections
I start almost all my programs with a shell script that emails me who is using the program, what version they're running, and some other stuff. If nothing else, it's useful for the bean counters who want to track software usage to see if your job is worth keeping.
My software has a licensing scheme where each installed copy generates a unique product ID, and I then email the customer a matching code that unlocks the full program. So I know exactly how many (paying) customers I have.
This doesn't count people using cracked versions, but I'd rather not know how many of them there are anyway.
Since you can have multiple users on a single license, the only thing you can really do is add something to your software that sends a notification to your server every time the application starts. Obviously this won't catch people who aren't connected to the Intertubes, but there's no way to measure them anyway (short of calling them, as you've mentioned already).
Well I would certainly hope you know who you're selling your software to if you're keeping licenses like that, and that you have their phone numbers. Give them a call, sit on the phone with them for a while, ask them what they'd change, what they don't like, what bothers them.
That would truly be going the extra mile, and would most likely impress whoever is using the software. When you call, make sure to let them know you aren't some 3rd party calling on your company's behalf, let them know you actually work on the software that they're using, and that you really want to know what they think, and that their opinions have some form of influence on future versions and features.
You could also send out a mass e-mail to do the same thing, but that's lazy, imo.
Auto-Update w/ usage stats is a GREAT idea.