Selling plugins - best practices?

Experienced rhino plugin developers, can I ask for your help.

What would you consider best practices for licensing/selling plugins for Rhino?

  • End user license agreement
  • License control (Zoo??)
  • Billing
  • etc

What’s been your experience?

Where have you gone wrong?

What would you do differently?

Cheers

DK

I’m don’t yet meet your criterion of being an experienced Rhino plugin deployer myself but I’d like to see this discussion progress.

Re: licensing, there are at least two well-received plugins which have made their choices public: the choices are Copyminder and wyday.

There are many payment processors out there, such as digitalriver, authorize.net, fastspring, etc. Pretty much all of them offer a way to call a vendor’s code to create license keys. Some of them seem stronger than others in particular international markets (support of locally popular payment methods) so that may be a factor for some developers.

It seems convenient to use the Rhino Cloud Zoo because the user is obviously familiar with the Rhino licensing UI. Cloud licensing is also more user friendly than locking to hardware fingerprints. It’s also easier to cheat or crack than more aggressive copy protection approaches, but it seems that even relatively small market software will inevitably be cracked these days so it’s probably best spending developer hours on servicing the legitimate customers rather than keeping others out.

.NET executables themselves are much easier to decompile than other executables and I’m not sure what typical .NET developers are doing these days. I’ve written .NET software but the bulk of the software processing has been underneath, called by the .NET code, so I didn’t dig too deep into that issue.

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