Project Licensing Code

ajish.raju

After waiting for more than an year to get the full payment for a project in Africa, i am thinking of adding a project licensing code in my projects so that the user will be prompted to pay up once the free days are over.

Has anyone tried this before and is there any legal issues with doing this exercise.

DHawthorne

I once heard of a case where the programmer had a popup on an in-wall touch panel reminding the client to pay a past due notice, and it appeared when the customer had guests. They saw it, and he sued the programmer for defamation of character and won. I think you might be safe if you disable some features and sent a private message, but be careful about what you do that can be seen by others.

GregG

This is usually a pretty touchy subject, esp. when the end user is almost never the same person who is responsible for pay for the code (dealer/installer).

Back when we were a much smaller company and could not easily afford a lack of payment, we included a tracking module that had a kill switch built in. It would ping our server with the job name and the master's serial number and let us know if the code was copied or reused, and give us some options for disabling the job or sending messages to the touch screens. It only worked in our favor one time when a dealer went out of business without paying, so we added a message on the panel about the code not being properly licensed and including a phone number to call. We ended up getting payment as part of some upgrade work we did directly for the user. But this is the only time it ever worked in our favor, and we don't include such things any longer.

There is a lot of precedent for including "not licensed" type warnings in running code (thanks Windows).

The big problem is with offline systems, since you have to rely on date/time from the master, but it is possible to track an install date in a persistent variable and use a key code that can be calculated based on the master serial number and/or mac address. I would only really get into using this model if we were selling modules instead of complete projects.

It is considered more professional to get sign off about completion of a job and deal with collections later, than to build a job that has a time bomb. And just never do work again for someone who hasn't paid.

rfletcher

If you do go down this road make sure you don't disable or interfere with any lighting controls or anything else that could reasonably be interpreted as impacting safety. You don't want to wind up with liability for someone getting hurt because they couldn't turn the lights on.

ericmedley

I don't know if it's still policy but early on back in Axcess days I remember a programmer who put in a deadbeat wait that would check a flag and if not zero would throw a "wait until" thus locking the program. The client raised a stink and the guy was no longer able to do AMX programming.

I thnk we all have a story to tell similar to yours. I try to get paid more in stages as we go along. At least that way you don't end up losing everything.

John Nagy

We tackle this from the other direction.

Our code will run for 12 hours and stop, requiring a reboot and a DEMO command from telnet to restart, unless there is an encrypted key, specific for the serial number of the NetLinx, in the file system of the NetLinx.

This 12 hour limit allows the dealer all they need for the deployment stage, but is unsuitable for customer use. We don't supply the key file until the job is paid.

This way we never take anything away for nonpayment. We don't deliver, which is totally legal.

ajish.raju

Thanks for the replies. I am thinking if its mentioned already in the proposal that there is a project licensing, then clients will not have an issue.