Why do I strictly separate the Demo from the Full version?

I have received a lot of encouragement and valuable feedback from many hams out there. Thanks to all of you.

Every once in a while I receive a “feature request” for a fully functional demo that would e.g. work for a certain period of time and/or then could be “unlocked” by buying a serial code (like it is common practice with many other software programs).

The other day I even had a mail from a ham that was just moaning about my Demo software to be totally useless.

As a quick reminder – my demo app is fully functional with only one single exception:
It will not automatically retune the rx audio (only the frequency display) in realtime, but the user can still retune it by manual intervention (hitting the Enter key inside the frequency box of the WebSDR). Only the full version does automatic realtime tuning.

Here is the “why”:

Without going into too many technicalities, the reason is that there are very good freeware .NET Decompilers which can restore my full program code including all original variable names and function names.

This makes all efforts of copy protections or demo limitations useless since such protection code written in Microsoft’s .NET programming languages (such as C# and VB.NET) are very easy to crack in less than 5 minutes with those decompilers even with very modest computer knowledge. (unlike programs written in other languages like C++ which are much more difficult to crack and need much higher skills)

This is why I have decided not to make a fully functional (or “unlockable”) demo available, even if it would be more convenient for the user.
It’s just for anti-cracking protection.

 

Having strictly separated demo and full versions is also a common practice nowadays in most apps on e.g.  Android or iOS devices.

Also some Ham radio programs apply a similar principle successfully to reduce the risk of software cracking.

To give you just two examples:
The famous “professional” contest logging software Win-Test as well as Writelog.
Both are around for many years and have not yet been cracked to my knowledge mainly for this reason. (unlike many other ham radio software).

So I hope you understand now why I opted for not building the full version functionality into the demo. The demo will still give you sufficient opportunity to test if the application works with your setup, rigs, etc.

After all it will allow you to judge if you like it or not – and if you do like it I highly appreciate your support.

Thanks for reading and 73…

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