Re: Any products to protect MVS software from cracking and reverse engineering?

I concur. I would think the motivations for breaking PC code just aren't there in the MF world.

Frankly, I would much rather all that effort be put into making the product more robust and easier to use. A simple licensing agreement gives you legal recourse and should take care of all but the most determined.


-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Tony Harminc
Sent: Tuesday, June 09, 2009 10:20 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Any products to protect MVS software from cracking and reverse engineering?

2009/6/8 shai hess <shai.hess@xxxxxxxxx>:
Any products to protect MVS software from cracking and reverse engineering?
[...]
 In PC the software companies try to make the life of hackers hard by using
anti debugger tools to make the hackers confuse but eventually these action
make the debugging in PC harder for more minutes or hours but nobody can
protect the PC software from being cracked.

Many years ago (1980s) I did encounter a VM product that tested for
several forms of tracing (PER, VM TRACE command) being on, and took
different code paths and even disabled PER at times. But it was (and
is) very rare.

What would be the point of cracking or reverse engineering mainframe
software? It is a rare piece of software that has a lot of value
locked up in a secret-sauce algorithm. Most software, imho, has its
value in the support services rather than magic code.

To be sure, someone could license a mainframe software product, and
then defeat the licensing scheme. But to what end? I have worked for
several ISVs over the years, and I have yet to see any serious
evidence of any of our products being stolen by either a customer or a
distributor. (Yeah, yeah - I know; if they were successful we wouldn't
know about it.) I'm not saying it never happens, but realistically,
what kind of customer would run such software? Or to put it another
way, what would be your sales pitch for PC-like tools to protect
mainframe software?

Tony H.



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