In the Flex and AIR software development community, there is much FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) surrounding the related issues of code protection and license control.
Once we begin to think about what it would take to control licensing of our software and keep it from being cracked and redistributed for free, or see our hard work stolen by a competitor with a decompiler, the attractiveness of trying to produce and sell our own software can quickly fade.
When all you want to do is focus on making your app the very best it can be, these questions are pretty depressing. You know it will take a lot of time to evaluate and implement something that will reliably control and protect the fruit of all the hours of hard work you’ll put in on your app.
I recently wrote an article for Flex and Flash Developer's Magazine on the topic of overcoming the FUD and getting on with selling your application. It's easy to educate yourself and make the right decisions if you know what questions to ask to frame the issue.
Just what are the dangers and the options for mitigating them? Are license control and code protection issues that developers should attempt to build their own solutions for? How reliable and secure are the off-the-shelf options and what approaches do they use? Should these issues be handled by a single product or multiple products? Once my product is ready to go, how do I sell and market it?
Download the July 2010 Issue of Flash & Flex Developers Magazine
I’ve been an Adobe Flex consultant for over 5 years, and when Adobe introduced AIR, like everyone else, I was tantalized with the possibilities. In today’s constantly-connected world, with more APIs than a developer can shake a stick at, you could do anything. The sky is the limit!
And like so many other developers, I’d like to supplement the income from my consultancy with a side income of some sort. Coding is what comes natural to me, and with the Adobe AIR installed user base now over 100 million users and growing strong, releasing an AIR app seemed a perfect way to make that extra income happen.
Once I began thinking about it, boy did the good ideas come.
Each and every idea that came to mind begged the same question: How can I make sure that I don’t just sell one license and then everyone else gets it from a ‘warez’ site?
If you’re planning to put your valuable time into developing an application for the purpose of supplementing your income, then you really need to be sure you ask yourself this question and are very confident of the answer before you write your first line of code.
Futurescale Delivers Quality for Defense & Space Industry Project
When Avtec Systems was awarded the contract to develop a Common Data Link Waveform Compliance Tester for the Joint Interoperability Task Force (JITC), they settled on Adobe Flex for the user interface.
Futurescale was chosen by Avtec to build the GUI for the CWCT, which will be used by JITC for verifying standard CDL waveform interoperability between candidate platforms or terminals and network systems in both classified and unclassified environments.
A complex hardware, software and firmware development effort with demanding specifications, the CWCT represents not only a solution to the client's problem but ultimately an advancement of the industry's state-of-the-art.
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