Nowadays, there are lots of discussions regarding software availability. There are people that scream against the commercialization and others that believe that it is needed.
Well, demanding to have any type of software for free and/or open source is at least pointless. Let’s don’t forget that employees in companies that do software development, are not robots. They have families and they must earn money to support them.
Furthermore, paying for a software is not necessarily bad. Money is a good motivation to work harder and produce better results. If everything was free, then why bother?
On the other hand, what it should be free, is the idea and an example of it so that a single developer could study it and use it for his own purposes. Of course you don’t need to provide all the details, just the idea and a proof that it works.
Anyway, this is one of those discussions that will never end since every person has its own point of views for everything.
However, what it should be free too, is anti-piracy! Yes, make anti-piracy available for everyone. Think about single developers. Do you really think that every single developer has the money to go through all the available commercial software protections or even more that he has the knowledge to code his own custom software protection?
The A.R.F Project has been inspired through all these thoughts. Those who claim that they crack software in order to force companies to make software free are either liars or incompetents.
Nobody cracks for that reason! People crack software protections for knowledge, for fun, for fame, and unfortunately some of them for profit. Do you really think that Mr. Cracker from the other side of our planet gives a damn if you can have an application for free or not? Trust me, he doesn’t! If he decides to crack your software is for personal satisfaction so that in the end he will be able to say “Yeah, eat that bitch”.
In any case, the purpose of this blog is not to give an answer if software should be free or not, but to give the possibility to everyone to have an understanding of many anti-reversing tricks and how they can be implemented so that everyone will have a chance against software piracy.
Of course, developing a custom software protection is not easy, but through The A.R.F Project it can be easier and that’s what I really wish to accomplish. I hope that in the days to come, many people will be helped and even inspired through articles of this blog in order to create their own custom software protections.
Cheers,
kyREcon