

Ask HN: Any possibility of making a pay-to-use Firefox extension? - SingAlong

Ask HN: Any possibility of making a pay-to-use firefox extension?<p>I'm developing an app on the firefox platform. I would like to know if there's anyway to make a pay-to-use extension (license key to activate thru net?). Pay-and-download would result in piracy.<p>Has anybody done this? How would you go about it?
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SwellJoe
I (actually mostly a contractor, though I ended up maintaining it) built a
toolbar back in the neolithic era (Firefox pre-1.0) for managing a URL
black/white list for a product I was developing at the time. We gave users a
username and password (the same one they used on the website version of the
tool), and they simply logged in. Anybody could download it, but it didn't do
anything useful if they weren't logged in.

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SingAlong
I'm trying to build a better extension builder for firefox.

So there's no data that's going to be downloaded or used by the extension from
the project site. Thats where i'm stuck. I can still provide login credentials
and allow the user only if the user check on the website passes. So i can
charge a per month fee maybe. But wont the user just edit the extension files
and disable the user check?

I'm gonna have to spend atleast another 4-5 months on this and give it my
best. So just dont want it to go waste.

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SwellJoe
I think you're being overly paranoid.

The people who pirate software don't buy software if they can't get a pirated
version. They just don't use it.

Offer support and updates via your website (requiring a login associated with
a valid license to get it), and you'll make it really hard to steal the whole
value of your product. Make automatic updates contingent on a valid license.
Phoning home is really hard to crack, since you have control over the whole
interaction and if you don't want to serve the update there's not a lot the
user can do to make you. If they disable automatic updates, they lose the new
features until another crack appears. If they leave them enabled they get a
popup reminding them that they haven't paid for your software (subtly, though,
as sometimes the user is innocent and the problem is technical or on your end;
something along the lines of "It appears your license is invalid. Please
contact blah blah for assistance in correcting this issue.").

The nice thing about this is that it keeps you honest. People who pay for
software expect, and deserve, regular updates correcting bugs and such. If
your license provides a year (or until the next major revision, or whatever)
worth of updates, you'll increase your sales and your customer satisfaction.

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safetytrick
I think its possible, I would pay for firebug now that I've used it so there
is a market.

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ajkirwin
Okay, real answer. First of all, you'll never be able to avoid piracy. Nature
of the medium.

Second, the best way would be to embed individual user credentials into the
extension. As in, they signup and pay or whatever, and you generate a unique
extension that contains their authentication information, which they then
install.

What is this for?

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SingAlong
Its a developer tool so the target audience are developers.

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ajkirwin
But what does it DO?

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earl
Does the license even permit this? I'm not going to do the legwork for you,
but I'd examine this very carefully with the help of a lawyer who has worked
on these sorts of issues before. This may mirror the driver issue in the linux
kernel -- even plugins may be contaminated by open source licenses.
(Contaminated used in the nicest way possible; I'm a big fan of OS licensing
and software.)

~~~
SwellJoe
Yes. Mozilla products are licensed very generously. It is a roughly BSD-like
license, though it has stronger trademark and liability terms.

The license is online, and the Mozilla foundation has never been secretive or
quiet about permitting commercial uses. Several companies have built
commercial products using XUL for the UI, for example.

This is definitely not a GPL-licensed codebase, and the license is in _no way_
"viral".

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ajkirwin
Firefox.. is not a platform.

