Yes, I seriously believes that a significant percentage of Keil's buying customers would be willing to use a cracked version for free, if they could.

Why? Because they sayve $4000 by not paying a license. More than one company don't care about paying for used products or about support until they get stuck. And when they get stuck, they get angry that they don't get support, since they have a commercial (but unpaid for) software.

If you where not thinking about the money - why would you then bother so much about thinking in investing so much time with the evaluation? The tools does support mixing of assembler and C, so a normal developer would write whatever he can in C, and then add in whatever assembler the project requires. A customer who do want support would figure out that $4000 is expensive, but still a limited amount of money - every saved hour will recover back some of the money from the license.

Any timing scheme that isn't locked to a hw lock or requires cryptographic access to a server the user don't have access to can be broken quite easy. The software guys just can't protect themselves from disk mirrors, virtual machines, ... Too good attempts to protect yourself will result in a huge percentage of valid testers not being able to run the software.

The only thing that works reasonably well is a tamper-proof device with non-volatile storage and encrypted or signed read/write operations. That still leaves the binary vulnerable to traditional cracking. And just so you know: PC programmers can be just as clever as embedded developers even if you are of the view that anything/anyone in relation to a PC is crap.

Hardware locks makes it impossible to distribute evaluation versions by just having the prospective customer download the tools from the web. And any scheme that don't catches a company aquiring multiple locks will allow the company to just get a new hw lock whenever they need to release a new version. But wait a minute - your suggestion was not 30 days calendar time but 30 days usage time. So every hw lock the company can get their hands on (at way less than $4000) would represent a full 30 days of use. Many companies would probably manage with one evaluation license/year, giving them 30 days every year for updating the firmwares of their products...

Registration with networked servers has the problem how you catch a customer that tries to register a second time when the first month is up. You don't need multiple computers to create multiple computer signatures. And it is hard to know what is a valid company in another country, so each employee could make a registration of their own.

Since people are cheap, a tool company must be prepared to ship quite a lot of evaluation versions for each sold one, so they can't afford much cost involved for each evaluation.

In the end, a demo license that counts used days instead of calendar days can be very good for the user, but can be very dangerous for a company expected to ship few, but expensive, tools. It doesn't take many cheaters to get a 10% loss of sales. But such a model for evaluations isn't likely to add so many extra customers.


Of course the price is the issue. Why else are you so worried about just buying the Keil license? The tool adds something you do not have, but does not remove anything. You are still just as able to write your assembler code. Unless I was correct in a previous comment - you don't want to look too hard at the Keil compiler, because you may find it way better than you want it to be.