It’s time to register your Speed Punk plug-in

yanone
yanone Posts: 130
in Type Design Software

Type designers:
I’m currently counting 82 unregistered installations of my Speed Punk plug-in for Glyphs.app (as opposed to 41 last time I checked two months ago). That’s a steep increase.
Glyphs.app’s plug-in update functionality includes a completely anonymous ID of your Glyphs.app installation. That’s how I’m counting.

If any of you people still hasn’t licensed it, now is the time to do it. Stealing other people’s software to create fonts that you’re going to sell is inacceptable behaviour. Even if you’re *just* a student. Anyone of you spends more than 20€ on a single night out. I know it. I’ve been a student. I’m giving students a 25% discount (after registration). The discounted 5€ prove how ridiculously cheap Speed Punk is.

82 installations equal a whopping 4 months of my rent. Or did you think type designers don’t need to pay rent, or food, or other software, or go out, because they’re artists?

Get it: http://yanone.de/software/speedpunk/

Apologies and many thanks to all those of you who have licensed it.


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Comments

  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,899
    Just wondering, does that anonymous ID change when you update your app? Not even with a full version update?
  • Hin-Tak Leung
    Hin-Tak Leung Posts: 363
    edited January 2016
    How the ID works is a trade secret that I would suggest @yanone not to answer. But if I were the author, and if this software does online update (which means the computer has network capability), I would apply a one-way hash to the mac address of the network interface card. MAC addresses are supposed to be unique across the world; and by hashing, I actually don't want to identify the users, but just a record of unique installations. The network card's mac address would stay the same across upgrade and re-install, of course.

    Use of the mac address as part of the unique ids for software licensing is fairly common practice.

    Granted on Linux and on some network hardware at least, the mac address can be set differently from the manufacturer's shipped value. But that's a fair amount of trouble just to steal a piece of software costing €20...
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,431
    Hin-Tak Leung said:

    Granted on Linux and on some network hardware at least, the mac address can be set differently from the manufacturer's shipped value. But that's...
    ...tedious and amenable to writing a program to make it a one click operation. 

    https://github.com/feross/SpoofMAC
  • James Puckett
    James Puckett Posts: 1,998
    Not that I think anyone would bother spoofing a MAC address to pirate a Glyphs, plugin, but the Mac OS network settings even has GUI support for changing the MAC address.
  • Georg Seifert
    Georg Seifert Posts: 674
    A pirated plugin will work regarles if you change the MAC address (or whatever is used as the base for the hash). This is only a counting tool.
  • Ray Larabie
    Ray Larabie Posts: 1,436
    Since you posted this, have registrations gone up?
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,899
    My question was not intended to ferret out secrets, but to better understand how to interpret Yanone’s data. Depending on what blows away registration, his quoted registration rates might be great or might be horrible, and I can’t tell without more information.  :)

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