In this feature we talk to Andy Bower, co-owner of Object Arts Ltd., makers of the Dolphin Smalltalk programming language and environment (see the Bitwise Tutorial To Dolphin Smalltalk)

Huw: What are the biggest pitfalls to watch out for when setting up a software company? If you did it all over again, what would you do differently?

Andy Bower: Someone once told us that it’s very important to release product and generate sales and customer interest as soon as possible. Hence, it is a good idea not to add too many bells and whistles into the first version of your software. As he put it, "nobody ever gets rich by getting it right first time". We were quite good at this and, over the years, we’ve so far had six update cycles for Dolphin, which is a good way to bring in further revenue from existing customers.

However, when we first started Object Arts we made the decision not to put any real capital into the company and to only reinvest what we made from sales. This meant that we were unable to do any initial marketing and, indeed, to this day we’ve never really paid to advertise the product (apart from via Google Adwords). We just assumed, back in those heady days of the dot com boom that Internet word-of-mouth would be sufficient. In retrospect, I think this was a mistake and it would probably have been better to allocate some capital for carefully targeted advertising; probably not for the first version of the software but perhaps for the more mature later releases.

Huw: What do you do in order to protect your software from being illegally distributed? Have you had any problems with software piracy?

Andy Bower: We have a "home-grown" encryption system based on using serial numbers to unlock the product. Occasionally we see Dolphin Smalltalk cropping up on hack/crack websites but these cracks are usually for the earlier versions where we didn’t have individual licensed serial numbers. In the past we’ve had a couple of bogus purchases with stolen credit cards and the serial numbers issued for these did appear on a crack website shortly afterwards. However, our unlocking mechanism has a list of "compromised" serial numbers that are hidden inside the download and we can easily update the product so that it can’t be unlocked with such stolen keys.

At one point (around 2002, I think) we did experiment with an "activation" scheme where each installation of Dolphin Professional would be tied to a particular machine (the machine identifier being composed of various hardware signatures, such as disk serial number and ethernet MAC address etc). Whenever Dolphin was started on a new machine the software would prompt to be activated by contacting the Object Arts website.

This worked quite well and would have allowed us to keep track of how many machines each serial number was used for. The license allows for a single developer to install Dolphin on any number of machines but at least it would have given us an indication of when piracy was taking place. It would also have allowed us some recourse to block the activation of pirated copies. However, when we beta tested the system we came in for a lot of grief from many of the users who tried it. Since we value greatly the support of the Dolphin community we didn’t want to alienate them so we decided to drop the activation scheme.

In retrospect, since a great deal of software is now activated in this manner, I think it would have been fair to press on with this protection method. Most people simply complained about the inconvenience of having to connect to the Internet to activate the copy, which these days seems ridiculous. However, one valid complaint was, given that Object Arts is a small company, what would happen to all copies of Dolphin out there if ever we stopped trading?

Huw: Is any sort of obfuscation used with Dolphin Smalltalk? If so, is this done with a third-party product?

Andy Bower: Not really. Once the product is unlocked you pretty much get access to all of the source (except for the virtual machine which is written in C++). All of the Smalltalk code for the system is available so, really, Smalltalk is the original "open source" system (not Open Source, though).

One problem we did have was how to give away a free cut-down version of the product and a trial version of the full commercial release alongside it. Someone could theoretically download the trial of Dolphin Professional and then export the source code and import it into a free installation and end up with a pirated copy of the full product. Anyway, we resolved this by encrypting just the source in the Professional trial that was not present in the free version. Rather complex I suppose but it seemed to work (although I suspect this is not really a situation relevant to most other types of software product).

Huw: How do you licence/register your software? What measures do you take to make sure that each product you sell can only be used by the registered purchaser?

Andy Bower: As I mentioned before, we issue a serial number for every license. Encrypted into each serial number is a unique "customer identifier" that is then encoded into the unlocked product. This means that if an unlocked copy of Dolphin Smalltalk is placed on the web, or turns up where it shouldn’t, we can use the identifier to find out who it originally belonged to and take the appropriate action. In fact, this identifier even gets encoded into any applications that are developed using the product so we can tell if these have been created using a pirated copy too.

Huw: But what is ’the appropriate action’ and how do you take it? I mean, I’m guessing that for a company smaller than, say, IBM or Microsoft, trying to take legal action against software pirates who may be operating from some other country must, in practice, be almost impossible. Are there any effective ways you can take action against someone you’ve identified as pirating your software?

Andy Bower: No, you’re right, we can’t really do anything. The only thing we’d actually do is to put the serial number on the compromised list but that wouldn’t have much effect since the unlocked product would already be out there. Fortunately, we haven’t come across this problem for real (probably because Smalltalk is such a niche market anyway).

Andy Bower is co-owner of Object Arts Ltd.
http://www.object-arts.com

“As you know, we sell a product called Dolphin Smalltalk. The development of Dolphin was started back in 1995 while we were working for another (larger) company. Shortly afterwards they lost interest in producing a Smalltalk development tool and so the project was cancelled. At that point, in 1997, we set up Object Arts Ltd and negotiated the rights to take Dolphin with us. We started selling product over the Internet early in 1998. The original development team was six people but, since starting Object Arts, we have been developing and maintaining the product with just two (such is the productivity of the Smalltalk language).”