Mint, Piracy, Encrypting your Code
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.Last night I moved my real time stat tracking from StatCounter to Mint. So far I'm pretty happy with it. What I found most amazing about Mint is that it only uses 2 tables and one of those is for prefs, so tracking data is all in one table. While this limits a few of the things it can do, I imagine it allows it to be very fast, even in high volume sites. I'm looking forward to seeing it's speed once it's got a few months of data in there.
The other day Shaun Inman (creator of Mint) posted about rampant priacy of the Mint code. Mint is a PHP app and Shaun distributes Mint with complete source code. I feel for him, because he's in a very tough spot.
With HelpSpot I have it pretty easy because my customers are 100% business users. Having to use the Zend Optimizer hasn't been a big barrier, most deal with much larger barriers when installing the competition or other business apps in general so installing Zend is nothing. In addition, they're mostly paying me for support and upgrades, so stealing the code isn't really worthwhile. They could use free request managers as it is, they purchase from me because they like the product and just as important, they know it's supported and they'll receive upgrades, support, etc. Heck it's pretty easy to decompile encrypted source if you really want to, there's just not much reason to with HelpSpot.
Shaun is in a totally different boat. His client base in large part non-corporate. Lots of individuals, bloggers, and so on. They just want to use the software and many have the free time and inclination to decode the software if he did encrypt it. Selling web apps to individuals has got to be a real pain!
It sounds like he's working on a decent plan. I'm pulling for him, since he's made an incredible app that is a steal for $30.
Discussion
I do wonder: what is 'rampant' and 'flagrant' piracy? Is that even worse than 'normal' piracy?
I am a bit surprised by the strong language in that thread. I totally understand the author is upset, but all the commenters as well? Maybe I live in a totally different world than them, but in my world almost everyone has at some point in their lives used pirated software.
And another pet-peeve: piracy is not stealing. Two years ago burglars broke into my home office and stole everything (including my source code and the backups -- I know, make off site backups every day). It was GONE. Forever. All the things that had specific memories, I will never see and touch them again. Piracy is just that: piracy. A pirate does not remove something from your posession. That doesn't mean piracy is OK. It is just not stealing.
Created by lena on 02.12.2006 10:02 am
Well Lena I don't think I agree with your assessment. First, I think he feels strongly about it because it's very personal for him. It's not the software of a big company, this guys sweat is in every line of code and that makes is much different on a personal level.
If it was a small percentage using pirated copies he probably wouldn't make a big deal, but mint gets alot of play on blogs and as such a viral product a pirated version could be very detrimental to him. If it becomes extremely easy to use a pirated version he has no defense and his income will fall to $0. That is stealing to me. If he's making $50,000 a year on Mint and next year he makes only $10,000 that money has essentially been stolen. Those sales are gone forever.
In the end it comes down to percentages. Most of the world uses pirated versions of MS Office, but since MS can still make so much money selling to corporations who need support, it's not a huge deal. Most of the people who still it would never have purchased it anyway because the price is too hight. Shauns program is totally different. The people stealing it would normally be his customers, and they certainly can afford $30 so it's have a large impact on him.
Created by Ian on 02.12.2006 10:02 am
Thanks for your reply. I still disagree. I don't know the numbers, but I totally understand the author is upset, and I think piracy is very wrong. I am not sure the people who pirate his software would otherwise have bought it, though. May be, maybe not, but I think a large percentage of them would otherwise just use another free statistics program, or pirate another program. 30 dollars is obviously not much for you. You live in the US where a normal monthly salary is about 2000 dollars, I guess. Most people in the world live in countries where 30 dollars is a lot more than it is for you and me.
Again: that does NOT mean it is OK to pirate software. But I don't think it is OK to pirate Microsoft software either. In fact, I think MS Office is extremely cheap for what you get, and everybody who needs MS Office, can afford to pay for it. Home users do not need MS Office, they can use Wordpad or Open Office. Yes, MS is a large company, but large companies also have a lot of personnel. Nice people, with families to support, who would like to keep their job.
A lot of people, especially young people, are just not going to pay for software or music. Maybe because they do not have any money or a creditcard (not having a creditcard or paypal is very common outside the US), maybe because they don't want to. Sometimes they grow up to be responsible adults, and buy the licenses they need (and stop using what they don't need).
Created by lena on 02.12.2006 10:02 am
I seem to get an odd C++/PHP style "//tracking" comment appear whenever I try and view your site (even the main http://www.userscape.com site). Looks slightly unnerving to me!
Created by MattBreckon on 02.12.2006 10:02 am
I get the same comment as Matt. It disappears on some pages after they are fully loaded, but on some (like http://www.userscape.com/products/helpspot/) it just stays there.
Ian, regarding the Zend Optimizer: it might be a stumbling block for small companies like mine. It is what stopped me from looking at HelpSpot for the time being -- it turned out my hosting company does not provide it and there is no way to get the Optimizer nicely packaged for debian, so it will take me more time to install it on my development server. I don't have that time now.
I'm not saying it is a lost sale for you, since I do want to look into it sooner or later, especially since I started working on an application I would like to interface with HelpSpot, but I just want to let you know that the barrier is not that small.
I don't use PHP that much, but perhaps there are ways to obfuscate the code without forcing users to install software like the optimizer? If done right, it should make it sufficiently difficult to circumvent the protection code without forcing users to install any external software.
Created by Marcin Kaszynski on 02.12.2006 10:02 am
Thanks guys for the note on //tracking. That's what happens when you install a new stat counter at 1 in the morning and use PHP style comments in the HTML header instead of HTML style!!!!
For some reason Safari never showed it to me, weird.
I agree Marcin, that there is some downside and it's not pain free. I'm still a bit amazed that some hosting companies don't have it. Most will install it if you ask them to, so you might want to just drop them a line and ask.
My longer term solution is to provide a hosted trial so that you can check it out, before having to install it, but that's still a few months away.
Nice to hear you have an idea for a product which would work with HS. Keep your eyes out for the new web services interface coming out next month. That should allow you to do all kinds of neat things with HelpSpot.
Created by Ian on 02.12.2006 10:02 am
Ian: you are right, a hosted demo would help a lot. I will try and bug the hosting company to see if they can install the zend software.
The WS api is indeed great news. I tried to contact you via email regarding the application a couple of days ago, as I'm doing some market research and trying to get more detailed idea of what might be useful for other people. Might have hit a spam filter, though 
Created by Marcin Kaszynski on 02.12.2006 10:02 am
Huh, let me check on that and get back to you!
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Created by Ian on 02.12.2006 10:02 am