Joys of BPL building.

What happens when cracked DCUs are not available, and cracked BPLs goes available?

Continuing with BPLs (or Delphi DLLs in other words) The first thing that happens are posts from pirates are those asking for help to deploy his solution. Your reviewer was amused over forum posts, such as, which BPL files to redistribute.

One notable vendor (reasonably, after reading this blog) started to ship BPLs only for their demo version. Then, it was "cracked", partly because they used weak copy protection...

The fun part was the uncomfortable side-effects it caused for users. Now suppose you protect a BPL with Armadillo or WinLicense or EXECrypt. The first thing that happens is loss of debugging ability with your component. Sure, they can debug, but when they step-into the BPL, the Delphi EXE crashes or bombs. Several users reported that the vendor's demos worked 100% and their programs (with cracked BPLs) does not work and needed "help" for someone else "share" the paid version. Would you be so kind to buy it and share it? :)

The next fun part is environment. That vendor forced them to use the default version of Indy that ships with Delphi. Since Indy is often recompiled, asking the user to adjust back to default version of Indy was painful.

The next fun part is deployment. Since the person using BPLs would have to ship many other BPL files, it becomes difficult for the person to deploy it without having to redistribute other necessary BPLs.

After much annoyances, the unpaid user was saving-up to buy the component, to "share" it with his friends. After sharing it, he lost his license because of ... watermarking. :)