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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

Futurescale, Inc. today announced the launch of Zarqon™, a cloud-based system that allows developers to easily issue and enforce licenses for Adobe® AIR®- and Adobe® Flex®-based applications.

“We’re empowering developers to create side revenues by giving them an inexpensive and reliable method of controlling access to their desktop or web applications,” said Cliff Hall, Futurescale’s CEO. “Developers sell their applications anywhere and anyhow they like. Their data is secure. It never passes through our servers and they pay us no royalties, percentages or fees on the licenses they sell.”

Zarqon gives developers feature-level control of their software, which is stored and accessed for pennies per month in their own Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) account.

Read more: Futurescale Releases Zarqon

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.

Read more: Why We Built Zarqon

For several years now, we have been receiving calls and emails looking for PureMVC talent. The Adobe Flash Platform is hotter than ever and PureMVC, a leading architectural framework for Flex, Flash and AIR has grown in demand as a result.

In the above trend graph from SimplyHired, you can see the volume has grown by quite a bit over the last year. 346% to be exact. And while relative volume may be small compared to the broader job pool and terms like 'Flash', it's still representative of the increasing interest in PureMVC specifically stated in job requirements.

Along with that trend, we have seen an increase in the number of inquiries regarding PureMVC-based Flash Platform architecture and development assistance. We have gone so far as to get several good coders under contract, but this year we're making a dedicated effort to recruit PureMVC-literate Flex and AIR developers for the purpose of filling this void.

Read more: Contracting with Futurescale