Thursday, January 12, 2006

observed: preemptive solutions

A year ago I had the opportunity to meet Gabriel Torok, the CEO of Premptive Solutions, and my first impression was that he seemed way too normal a guy to be a macha. But there you go.

Preemptive - authors of Dotfuscator and DashO - have a value proposition that you can say with your mouth full of food. Which, if you know me, is my measure of a good value proposition.

"If you're writing commercial software in .NET or Java, anyone can look at it, figure out how it works, and make it their own. Unless you take the time to encrypt it ahead of time. Preemptive sells software that does that really, really well."

A couple of weeks ago I got a "Friends and Family" newsletter from Gabriel with news on the progress of Preemptive over the last year. In a day and age when most startups are chasing rocket-science Web 2.0 stuff, it's a real pleasure to see a growing company making a go of it in what is frankly a rather non-sexy market niche.

With the hue and cry over evil content providers growing louder each day, I think it is only a matter of time before the line between "source protection" and "license protection" thins away to nothing. Why bother enforcing entitlements to .NET and Java applications if you're not obfuscating? Duh.

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