If crackers can make light work of patching licensed software from the likes of Microsoft and Adobe, what makes you think that your licensing is any better?
We use 3rd party copy-protection software. Not sure if it's better or worse than Microsoft's and Adobe's.
Holders of the license would get early access to updates. There's still a room for additional 20-30% optimization.
As soon as the binary is available to someone who wants to disassemble it, you cannot prevent it from being reverse engineered, simple as that.
So you see no difference in reverse engineering and patching?
As a reply to some of the posters in this thread from someone who's done this publicly before:
(a) Self-mining usually doesn't work for the devs. Most of us don't have big GPU farms - we like to code, not manage clusters, or we'd be managing clusters. Second, it's very capital-intensive, and therefore risky. Letting people who already have GPUs mine is a far more effective way to go - more people running the software, no need to buy more GPUs into the mining ecosystem.
(b) The copy protection only has to be "good enough." If they charge, e.g., 0.07 BTC per GPU -- something in the range of a week's worth of mining output -- is someone with 50 GPUs really going to find it worth putting in 10+ hours of work to break the copy protection? Or pay 3.5BTC and call it a day? Of course, there's always going to be someone hanging around bored who wants to crack your software, but it'll take a while, and the self-interested parties won't release it publicly.
(c) If we're being honest, the big concern is not spiking the diff for the sake of difficulty: It's making sure that the people who pay for the software make a profit on it before the diff rises to the point where it's no more profitable than mining litecoin. That enables the devs to profit, and provides a reason for purchasers to take an up-front risk of paying for the software in the very uncertain world of crypto-currency mining. But that also means that the people who buy the software
also have an incentive not to let it out into the wild: Because they'll never recoup their investment if they do.
If they don't hand out the miner binary, and have license-based copy protection, it's not crazy at all to think that they would get a few months of activity before someone released a cracked version of it or some other dev took the thermonuclear option and released an open source GPU miner. (No, that won't be me, I'm sticking to RIC. :-).
It's not dissimilar to pre-orders for hardware miners, if you think about it that way: Some people pay a lot of money up front to have access first. They're funding the time and money it took to develop the hardware. After that, availability increases, price decreases, but the mining difficulty increases and later buyers get cheaper hardware but lower income. It's just that hardware has built-in copy protection (grin).
