> You might think cracking dongles is fun and copy protection is evil, but without protection, our livelihood is affected.
I understand you might feel this way, but it seems to me customers are mostly business clients, who would are more inclined to spare the expense of purchasing said licenses, since they're not personally buying it themselves, and would want to have support and liability (i.e: Someone to hold liable for problems in said software.). In fact, having no copy protection would probably have saved you the problem you mentioned where a dongle breaks and replacement parts are no longer available; this is one of the talking points that anti-drm/copy protection people advocate for, software lost to time and unable to be archived when the entities who made such protections go out of business or no longer want to support older software.
> even on legitimate platforms like Shopee or Lazada.
On a slight tangent, but I personally don't find either platform legitimate (Better than say, wish[.]com or temu, but not as "legitimate" as other platforms, though I can't think of a single fully legitimate e-commerce platform). Shopee collects a ton of tracking information (Just turn on your adblocked, or inspect your network calls. It's even more than Amazon!), is full of intrusive ads, sketchy deals, and scammers. You yourself said you can easily find cracked versions of the dongle there, which doesn't speak well for the platform. And Lazada is owned by Alibaba Group, which speaks for itself. I'm not sure why consumers in South East Asian regions aren't more outspoken about this, since they seem to be the some of the more popular e-commerce platforms there.
>business clients, who would are more inclined to spare the expense of purchasing said licenses, since they're not personally buying it themselves, and would want to have support and liability (i.e: Someone to hold liable for problems in said software.)
This is a nice idea but the reality is that there's MANY corporate customers who are happy to get away with casual piracy. Sometimes it's a holdover from when the company was small enough that every business expense is realistically coming out of their own pocket, sometimes they're trying to obfuscate how much their department actually costs to the company at large.
You think individual consumers lie to themselves to justify software piracy? Corporate self-deception is a WHOLE new kettle of fish.
I can tell you that piracy in the corporate world was RAMPANT in the ‘90s. I made a nice sum of money back in the day as a freelance auditor for companies trying to get their legal ducks in a row. Productivity software like Lotus, WordPerfect, Word, Excel were just mass installed off one license because there was no product activation keys or any sort of license validation methods.
Dongles were pretty commonplace on your more expensive software products from mid 90s through the early 00s. If I was publishing software that was a >$1000 a license, I damn sure would have used them.
Even at a simple level, if it's between spending weeks going through purchasing or not asking too many questions and getting on with it. I can see a lot of people choosing option B.
Also don’t underestimate the stupidity of inexperienced employees in their mid 20s…
One found someone installed a cracked Adobe Photoshop on a work PC. Probably a stupid one/off task. We were not graphic artists. Not 100% sure who did it but it was in an area only a few people had access.
The risk management team was not amused…
Yeah case in point - how many people actually pay for Visual Studio? You're supposed to if you're using it for commercial purposes but I don't think I've ever seen a commercial license used (though I don't do a lot of Windows work tbf).
VS is actually one of the cheaper tools in our stack; Unity (the game engine) is probably the most expensive one at the moment, and it's going to get much more so with their recent changes to licensing structure for embedded hardware.
Unity has always had janky shaders, the fact people still use it over Unreal Engine or even Godot is completely baffling.
Unity is getting way too cheeky considering how they started out. =3
For anything smaller than AAA, C# is just generally much more pleasant to work in than C++. That's Unity's edge. And Godot is the "new" kid on the block
I'd agree that between Unreal and Godot, Unity doesn't look very attractive right now. But inertia will carry them for a long time
Programming semantics is a large part of the equation, but it's a secondary part. Unity is just too damn EASY for spinning up a prototype and gluing other modules onto it. C# is a part of that but simple implementation is so much easier and powerful than other engines.
This goes out the window for polished end products but that's a different argument... but by then the ship has often already sailed and you're already using Unity.
A few of those Unity store Assets are Copyright submarines. Where the original rights holders work was slightly tweaked to avoid detection for royalty fees in some jurisdictions.
Those assets end up being a liability later after publishing, can get your content DMCA flagged, and a firm sued (you will 100% lose in court if you don't settle.)
The Unity store does not prevent this issue, and kit bashing fun became dangerous to a publisher on the platform. It was impossible to determine what is safe with the new LLM tools, so the board banned the platform and engine.
Firms do make this mistake everyday, or just license generic Reallusion content. =3
"There is a bear in the woods. For some people, the bear is easy to see. Others don't see it at all. Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it's vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who's right, isn't it smart to be as strong as the bear? If there is a bear." (Hal Riney)
In the late 90s/early 00s, I worked at a company that bought a single license of Visual Studio + MSDN and shared it with every single employee. In those days, MSDN shipped binders full of CDs with every Microsoft product, and we had 56k modems; it was hard to pirate. I don't think that company ever seriously considered buying a license for each person. There was no copy protection so they just went nuts. That MSDN copy of Windows NT Server 4 went on our server, too.
This was true of all software they used, but MSDN was the most expensive and blatant. If it didn't have copy protection, they weren't buying more than one copy.
We were a software company. Our own software shipped with a Sentinel SuperPro protection dongle. I guess they assumed their customers were just as unscrupulous as them. Probably right.
Every employer I've worked for since then has actually purchased the proper licenses. Is it because the industry started using online activation and it wasn't so easy to copy any more? I've got a sneaky feeling.
> In the late 90s/early 00s, I worked at a company that bought a single license of Visual Studio + MSDN and shared it with every single employee.
During roughly the same time period I worked for a company with similar practices. When a director realised what was going on, and the implications for personal liability, I was given the job of physically securing the MSDN CD binder, and tracking installations.
This resulted in everyone hating me, to the extent of my having stand-up, public arguments with people who felt they absolutely needed Visual J++, or whatever. Eventually I told the business that I wasn't prepared to be their gatekeeper anymore. I suspect practices lapsed back to what they'd been before, but its been a while.
Yeah, there is a reason why Adobe, Autodesk, Oracle, IBM, etc., are notorious for weirdly draconian and idiotic-sounding licensing enforcement. Many corporate managers show very little sympathy to the concept of IP laws if they did understand superiority of laws over convenience in the first place.
> who would are more inclined to spare the expense of purchasing said licenses, since they're not personally buying it themselves
They often need to "purchase" the license themselves in the sense of convincing someone higher up to buy it - so they're spending their time, which is still a sort of expense.
Also, piracy in companies is often just honest people who are in a bit of a hurry and need this software running on some other PC right now, or just want their colleague to give it a quick go (but then they end up using it all the time). Copy protection helps keep those honest people honest.
> I understand you might feel this way, but it seems to me...
I always thought that selling B2B. Then I started checking and it was much worse than I expected. Big corporates were mostly fine but small to medium sized business were pretty bad. Also Asia was much worse than Europe and the US.
> it seems to me customers are mostly business clients, who would are more inclined to spare the expense of purchasing said licenses, since they're not personally buying it themselves, and would want to have support and liability
Trust the people whose paychecks depend on it, it was extremely common. I knew multiple people at different companies who had endless stories about customers buying a couple of copies for a large department to “share”, and they expected the vendor to support everything because it was “business critical”. This was also a problem for things like student licenses where people would expect enterprise-level support despite the massively-discounted copy they had clearly stating it was only for educational usage.
This has a lot of negative aspects for preservation, downtime due to issues with licensing, challenges around virtualization or hardware replacement, etc. so I don’t love the situation we ended up in but it’s entirely understandable given how pervasive theft was – there were a ton of small businesses which ran entirely on bootlegged software. Software developers have high leverage but if you aren’t in a mainstream market you’re not going to get over the threshold where you’re no longer worried about making payroll.
You’re using “spare” incorrectly. It means to avoid. “Spare the expense” means to avoid having to pay for the license. Which seems to be the opposite of what you are saying.
“Spare the money” is probably what you mean. That is to part with the money, to avoid having it, for example by spending it. Or by giving it away - As in “can you spare a dime.” The is the inverse of sparing the expense, just as an expense is the inverse of money.
Yes, I meant to say "spare no expense" (though it isn't a drop in replacement, the sentence would need to be restructured slightly).
The honestly of clients, even businesses, is...questionable. I have an acquaintance who sells a very expensive software suite that is absolutely needed in a particular industry. Price for a perpetual license is 6 digits.
The big boys in the industry won't risk problems, and anyway, that's a small price for them. However, the many smaller companies? They may absolutely need the software, but that's a substantial price for them. If they can get a cracked version online, they do.
And the cracked versions? They are made by companies out of legal reach: Russia, Belarus, Pakistan, India. They crack the software, and either put it online for free, or even have the cheek to sell it for a reduced price.
I've told my friend/acquaintance that he really needs to put the software in the cloud, accessible only via browser. However, this would be a massive undertaking, so he hasn't done it (yet).