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Ask HN: Any possibility of making a pay-to-use Firefox extension?
Ask HN: Any possibility of making a pay-to-use firefox extension?
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.
Has anybody done this? How would you go about it?
- ajkirwin 18y agoFirefox.. is not a platform.
- ajkirwin 18y agoOkay, 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?
- earl 18y agoDoes 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 18y agoYes. 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".
- safetytrick 18y agoI think its possible, I would pay for firebug now that I've used it so there is a market.
- SwellJoe 18y agoI (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.
- SingAlong 18y agoI'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.
- statictype 18y ago>But wont the user just edit the extension files and disable the user check? I guess that's the open-source equivalent of changing a jne to a nop. You can't really prevent someone from doing it, but if they did do it, it would break your licensing terms and would be illegal. That's pretty much all the deterrant you can get.
- SwellJoe 18y agoI 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.