cant believe he even posted it, he is seriously stupid but glad he did and got a right kicking for thieving.
Because that is exactly what it is, stealing, robbery, scruping, pirating, its all the same, its stealing someones elses work for nothing. Parents need to be tougher on their kids and get to grips with the music sites and then the video and software and explain the issues, problem is the parents are the ones who probably start them off…
I’m gobsmacked that it is just two devs that have created Lightburn For such a polished, bug free, comprehensively featured and easy to use software tool, I would have thought the team would have been much bigger. Interface designers, user reps, testers, coders, managers, where are they? Two guys??? These guys would be welcomed with open arms into any software development shop, and could probably get any salary they wanted. Lucky for us they chose to develop and maintain Lightburn instead.
For the first couple years, LightBurn was just one developer (me). In March of 2020, Adam joined full time (he’d been contract coding for a few months prior), and this year we’ve added another full time dev, and a junior one.
My girlfriend / partner in crime has a degree in graphic design and has handled most of the branding, logos, website graphics, packaging, etc, in addition to handling physical shipping and giving feedback on usability. Ray and Rick started tagging along pretty early on helping with support needs, and we’ve added a couple more there recently too.
We’re a small but highly motivated group of weirdos. 
I read your notification literally. 35 years in the IT business gives me a slightly different perspective. 
You overlook the active community that helps support and fill in when help is needed.
Please stay small. To many cooks in the kitchen spoil the recipe.
I have seen companies get to large and the communication between to many programmers causes productivity to be lost. You are on the cutting edge, please stay on it. You have a great product.
We have no plans to get huge - We want to try very hard to stay “just big enough”.
So they thought they were buying it somewhat legit just an incredible deal. Hope people weren’t too hard and navigated them to this amazing Community that we do have haha. But yes that was great. Maybe add a link to where they can purchase a legit copy in it as well haha
I have friends asking for guidance on new laser purchases and I see where these lasers on eBay offer Lightburn as included software. I tell them I doubt it is a true license program and to always purchase the real license and enjoy the great software. Thanks again for having a great, easier to use program
Bravo @LightBurn. Speaking as a software developer, who grew up with a Dad who was an independent software developer back in the '80s (Ancient Brochure), I can say that this is the best thing I’ve seen all day. Software Piracy takes food away from real people. I can’t imagine having to deal with the kind of institutionalized licensing cracking that goes on now.
John
If it comes with a license key number, and goes through our server, it’d be legit - We have a resale agreement with Orion Motor Tech, who’s a pretty big reseller on EBay / Amazon. If you get the software and don’t need to enter a license key, those are the ones that aren’t valid.
Perhaps a QR code could be of service for the link to where the legit software can be purchased 
I just purchased through the website. Thanks for the great software.
We’re not exactly hard to find. 
Honestly, any changes to that code could provide way for someone who knows what they’re doing to find and remove the message, so I’m a bit reluctant to change it.
Copyright laws in the US end at the border. Many countries have reprocity agreements but not all. China, Russia, and India all ignore US copyright laws. India is more discreet, printing and selling only in India to avoid detection. China is communist, that says it all. Russia is a dictatorship, talk to Putin. We don’t rule the world, we’re just a part of it. K40 provides illegal altered copies of Coreldraw 12, I believe. China companies are all run and monitored by their government. AliExpress is an above board business. And its not just software, its parts as well. FTDI had illegal parts showing up several years ago, complete with silk screen mask.
Regardless, that doesn’t excuse someone from buying a knockoff.
If one buys the products, they are buying stolen intellectual property.
People who buy the stuff are the main reason there is a problem.
Well, that’s assuming they knew it was a knockoff. How would they know that? Price, telepathy, common knowledge? If no one knows what they thought, maybe someone should ask them. I have been in software development for almost 47 years. I’ve owned and run many businesses. I had a book that was published in 2004, and a friend complained about the price of a new copy two years ago. Its a 478 page book on development and it was being printed and sold in the US by a foreign printer. It looked exactly like the original except for the paper weight used. Is anyone who purchased that book guilty of stealing? No at all, I bought a copy and was amazed at how well they had copied and printed the book. And I lost thousands of dollars in royalties. Not everyone purchasing a knockoff is necessarily guilty of bad behavior. And if I knew how to reach those who bought one of those books, I would put them on the email list for the new edition coming in a few months.
There are a number of ways to curtail that problem by education. One would be to have authorized dealers listed on the web, and make it clear that nothing purchased outside those sources are legitimate or supported copies. I went to the web site and didn’t see any mention of authorized dealers. Educate them to not obtain pirated copies. If you don’t educate them and accuse them without knowing the truth, you really aren’t any better than you think they are. And if your wrong about them, it makes you a lot worse then they are! Find out, give them a discount for being taken advantage of and bring them into the group of registered users. That makes more sense than accusing them of something they may, or may not be guilty of.
But then again, what do I know?
And this topic is now closed from further input from me.
The software includes this message to inform them that their copy is not legitimate, and it’s necessary for us to do this because some retails are selling pirated copies of LightBurn. We’re not trying to harm the customer - we’re trying to harm those sellers. If I wanted to, the software could easily do things like wipe your hard drive, overwrite your controller settings with garbage data, or worse, but I chose to do this as way of letting people know in clear terms what happened.
LightBurn started very small, and is growing almost faster than we can keep up with, so your suggestion of a valid vendor list is something we’re likely going to have, but for the moment, we don’t.
On the other hand, if you do a Google search for LightBurn, and find that nearly everyone is selling it for $40 and $80, and some Turkish vendor on AliExpress is selling it for $5, along with copies of SolidWorks, Illustrator, etc, all for $10, and you purchase from them, I don’t have much sympathy - If a deal seems too good to be true, it is.
For the record, I did ask them, and the user said that copy was an add-on for a machine they purchased, and they paid $4 for it. In every case where a user has come to us and said they bought from a fake seller and didn’t realize until they saw the above message, we’ve given them whatever they paid as a discount toward a proper license.
In a number of pirate message boards, I’ve seen people complain that the cracked version is ruining their materials and they can’t trust the crack to do any real work, so it’s having precisely the desired effect.
When I purchased Lightburn, I found it mentioned in another forum and found your web site. I just did a quick scan this morning after reading the initial message. Damaging a system is a felony, there are laws that protect both the software developer and the consumer. Proving intent, is not at the software developers discretion, its the sole responsibility of a judge, so that option really isn’t viable; ask FTDI. They bricked counterfeit boards and got into serious trouble with the US government. That stopped them very quickly. You seem to have a pretty secure way of handling licenses, it would surprise me that you cannot simply disable Lightburn from executing after a number of executions, or simply deleting itself.
While there is no question that piracy is a problem, it has become less of a problem that it was 40 years ago. When software was sold on floppy disks it was a real big problem. I wasn’t intending to be nasty, just suggesting other ways of handling the situation with something less than a baseball bat to the users face. If they want to waste four dollars on a piece of software that prints that message, they already learned a lesson. I just figured that may have been a good reason for them to buy the software without making them look worse than they made themselves look. They have to get a program from someone, it may as well be the choice they originally made.
