I've been giving some thought to how to protect GBAL files, and whilst I what I propose wont change the format of GBAL it would require a few mods to the IDE
In addition, it wont stop people trying to convert back to C - although it would help if the conversion to GBAL had the ability to crunch the resulting code (although a lot can be done by the original coder).
Therefore, what I propose is :
All GBAL's should be place in one place within the GLBasic directory, with each given a separate directory. This applies to both commercial and free ones as well,
Each directory would contain the GBAL file and a license information file (LIF) (the contents of which will be discussed later).
When the IDE starts it would scan the GBAL directory looking for new directories (and retrieving each LIF file as it goes along), and comparing this to a previous list.
Once this scanning has finished, and any new commercial GBAL's have been found, a window will display the list, and the user will be asked to authenticate them.
The authentication process could be done in several ways : When a user has entered a, say, serial code, this would communicate with another server which would note the number of users, GBAL serial code and GLBasic serial code. This would allow easy detection of invalid multiple uses etc etc
The other way would be to create an encryption file (or modify the LIF file) that would contain the above mentioned information, but, of course, in a non-readable (and hopefully annoyingly difficult to decode).
Then, just before compilation, a check is made on all GBAL files - if they are not registered or invalid then they are ignored from the linking phase, creating an error.
This wont get around anyone doing all the compiling from the command line, but if anyone is that desperate, then you can't do that much about it.
