Peppermint Tea

Stopping Piracy of Mint by Shaun Inman

Posted 7 February 2006 in by admin -

Shaun Inman has written an article on his site over the weekend entitled Stopping Flagrant Piracy of Mint:

Let’s have this out in the open: Mint is being pirated. Which puts myself and all of Mint’s paying customers in a difficult position.

Mint’s source code is provided to every licensed user for many reasons. One is to simplify installation. Most commercial PHP software require a third-party decoder module be installed on the server in order to run the encoded source. In my experience, these decoders never work as advertised if a host even has them installed.

Yesterday Shaun wrote a follow up article, The Precedent of Piracy.

If you missed these and would like another outlet for discussion, feel free to leave comments!

Paul Says:

1244 days ago #

I am sorry to hear of this. There will always be people in the world who will steal. I hope someone or Shaun himself can put a stop to it.
 
La brujula verde » Mint pirateado Says:

1243 days ago #

[...] [Vía Peppermint Tea] [...]
 
Lurkmore Says:

1243 days ago #

He's overreacting. What can he do? I understand his frustration at people pirating his software, but it was bound to happen.

First of all, 99% of the people pirating Mint were never potential buyers in the first place. If they were interested in paying money for it, they would have from the start.

Second, EVERY piece of software is vulnerable to piracy. $1000+ software suites from Adobe/Macromedia get pirated as soon as they're released. I've seen $10 shareware VSTs get pirated. It doesn't matter that software it is, or how much it retails for, it WILL get pirated.

Shaun just needs to accept reality and move on.
 
Sam Says:

1243 days ago #

While I do agree that it was bound to get pirated, I do feel there are still measures that can be taken to stop the wide spread distribution of it.
 
Sheldon Kotyk Says:

1242 days ago #

Personally I would stick up a wall of shame and allow the community to share with the pirate, the reasons it would be better to purchase a license.

As for the price issue. I have shelled out $120 US for Mint licenses and would love to be able to shell out more but have resorted to moving a number of my subdomains onto my main domain so I can track stats using Mint. I would love to buy a 10 domain pack for $150 or something like that. I'd post this on Shaun's site but it would be so far down the comments he probably wouldn't see it.
 
Dan Grover Says:

1240 days ago #

I'm a shareware developer and I just found out my app is being pirated. My reaction was mixed -- the first being "holy crap, this is awesome! people like it enough they want to steal it!" -- but then I wondered if it's worth working to stop and if it would ultimately be beneficial to do so. I think maybe I'll have it work, but change the name of the registrant to "Cheap Bastard" or something.
 

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