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We have developed an open source web application under LGPL license and hosted in a LIVE demo server. Also the source code is available in source forge. Numerous downloads are being notified day by day. So we would like to track the live usage of this app on the web to have a idea about the count of live users.

Is there any way in Rails to track the usage this app being configured and used in systems that are connected to internet? Informative answers would help us to find out or to develop such a method in our application which would definitely help us to block piracy if we are making this product a commercial one in future.

Thanks :)-

Rajesh Omanakuttan
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1 Answers1

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Your question is really two questions:

  1. How can I see how popular my application is?

    • You can look at the download counts. Not foolproof because people might download from each other, and you'll miss them.

    • Crawl the web and see how many sites respond with your app's signature. Takes massive resources, plus you won't catch the ones that modified your code, and false positives from people spoofing your app's signature.

    • Make the app call home. Again, since people can just take out the code that does this, not foolproof.

  2. How can I make sure no one can pirate my app?

    • Your source code is free, so... you can't.

How does it make sense to be "selling" an open source app? Better to sell support.

Also, since you're using ruby, you'll have to use a compiler to produce a binary in order to avoid giving away your source code (as per the MIT license, which rails is released under).

A quick googling shows that some may exist, but making sure you produce a binary that works is going to take a lot of resources. So, there is a significant legal/technical barrier to keeping your source code closed. (Also, decompilers could easily be used to reverse engineer your app.)

  • Thanks for your reply. When we make the product commercial, we will stop providing the source code. That time we need to restrict piracy. At-least we should get a hit from the system which is using this app. – Rajesh Omanakuttan Mar 28 '13 at 10:21