So I've spent the last month and half working on the all the tidbits that address the process of selling software. It's painful, and I hate doing it because well it's just not fun code to me. A lot of that stems from the simple fact that I think of people as generally honest. The problem is that when you get into registration and maximizing sales revenue in software, that philosophy doesn't work.
In order to maximize shareware / software revenue, it really is necessary to take the approach that people won't pay up unless they are pushed to do so. That presents problems for me personally, as I don't really want to treat people that way. It doesn't help that once you get into the licensing issues, you have to work out something that doesn't really impede the legitimate user, but makes it hard enough to work around that the casual user won't work around it and will just pay up.
Balancing the two is tough. In the last 6 weeks, I've started and scrapped 4 different approaches, and have finally settled on a compromise that I'm more or less happy with. It's not unbreakable, it's not really that hard to break as a matter of fact, but it also isn't overly intrusive. So now that I have a method, I have to finish the code and make the servers use it. With a little luck, January 15 should be a big day for Druware, launching it's first commercially available application.