The term software pirate far outdates anything the RIAA and MPAA have been doing recently. In fact copyright infringement has been referred to as piracy since the 1700s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirated_software#Objections_to_the_term_.22piracy.22

The term is accurate and has nothing to do with either the RIAA nor the MPAA; nor does this article. Perhaps you would like to read the article you responded to?

I remember our original license system: a nice simple MD5 of the user’s email and a keyword. It was dead simple and easy to crack, but very reliable and hard to screw up. Sadly we had the bright idea to change it and ended up wasting a lot of time on it. I’m pretty happy with our new system now, but would happily give it up if I could have that wasted time back.

The general move at the moment is to go away from DRM which forcibly restricts (or forcibly enforces) licenses to a DRM model where the restriction is put back as the end-users hands. To try and explain myself better…

Example: iTunes Plus. No longer forced DRM. You can do with your media what you will. If you go over the 5 machine limit (that we once had), why would Apple/Record labels care? You’ve already spent the money on the media (they’ll get you again when FLAC is mainstream). Sure you can share with other BUT do you want your email address (watermark) out in the open Internet? The DRM is now in the hands of the consumer. This gives the user what they want, when they want it, and it’s (perhaps) enough to stop casual piracy.

Blog post scenario: Perhaps your not following the developers license agreement, perhaps you are. It’s a moot point. You’ve spent your cash, why does the developer care if you bought 1 license or a family pack? Is the fight for a few buck worth it? If we’re talking enterprise multi-thousand dollar type solutions, it might be a good idea. Home users? pah.

So how does a dev-house take an iTunes Plus approach?

Perhaps by using more than a serial code where the serial is bound to the users name or email address. What person wants to see their email address (paypal address?), name or credit card floating out in the Internets? It’s an honour system (like iTunes plus) and the DRM is in the hands of the user.

The average Mac user appreciates well designed small-scale commercial and shareware applications, and I would wager that a higher percentage of Mac users will pay, than Windows users. The sense of entitlement, if it exists anywhere, is strongest on Windows. Windows itself is the most pirated operating system in the world. So if you didn’t buy Windows, Office, AutoCad, and every other thing, are you going to buy some little utility? No. Pirates tend to be all pirate all the time.

I have generally tried to maintain one paid license for everything I actually use. I don’t buy every version upgrade (for example for iLife and iWork), but I do try to stay legit for everything that I actually use.

I should really zap that one not-very-legal copy of PhotoSomethingOrOtherMumbleMumble that I have on my Mac…. It’s giving me bad karma, I can feel it.

Warren

The version Microsoft Office I have does it too and it drives me nuts. I have several licenses but happen to put the same code into two different computers. And it treats me like a thief. Nasty.

I know you don’t want to give the crappy firm that caused this problem any publicity but their competitors product is so much better and the support from Justin is great.

However, I am sure if you are creative enough searching around, say twitter, you could probably figure it out. If you do figure it out, please don’t post it here, I will just delete it.

I was talking to a sales guy for a RH who got very upset that we were using CentOS as a replacement for the expensive RH licenses. When we started out, the cost of a few licenses was ok … but as we expanded it wasn’t worth it anymore. This personally hit me hard because I am an open source developer. I explained to him how open source works and that more then 75% of the code used in RH was not the property of RH anyway. He went off on a tangent trying to convince me what I was doing was wrong and illegal. Even after forwarding him to the GPL, he still didn’t get it.

I had another experience with MySQL. I was looking to purchase the MySQL enterprise monitor. Sun wants you to purchase a support contract for EVERY single MySQL instance you have. Even dev and staging environments!

Keep in mind, this is monitoring software. I wanted to purchase the software, NOT the support contract. The example that was used by the sales person was, that what I wanted to do was equivalent to “purchasing 1 copy of Office and installing it on every machine”. This isn’t even remotely close to what I wanted to do. However, with this attitude and approach they got exactly $0.00

Now, I wouldn’t even think about using their (monitoring) software, I am searching for alternatives just out of spite.

I also have a big problem with companies that charge out the ass for “creative” software knowing that mostly large companies will be forced to pay the heavy prices. What solutions do home users have ? They can’t afford $2,000 for your product.

Any chance you will mention who this company or software is ? I’d like to know who to avoid if its a product I am using or plan to use.