darrel said:
Also, in some ways, we might have been better off had people actually
copied our software freely. We're a niche product in a niche market and we
might have gained a lot of ground in the early years if people had
actually pirated our software more. Sounds odd, I know.
It sounds odd but makes a lot of sense. I've claimed in the past (may or may
not be true) that the reason AutoCad is still around and CadKey is not
revolves around the fact that CadKey required a hardware dongle and AutoCad
had no protection at all.
That meant that people going to school for AutoCad (or just learning as a
hobby) could simply copy it onto their local PC and do their homework while
CadKey students had to get permission from the instructors to "borrow" the
dongle... and, any sane instructor would say "no way!" to a student wanting
to borrow something like that.
In case you're not familiar with CadKey, CadKey was an excellent CAD package
designed for mechanical engineering while, at the time, AutoCad was designed
for architectural drawings. imo, there was nothing better available. You can
still find CadKey "bones" in MasterCam (a top dev at CadKey transferred to
MasterCam when the CadKey guillotine fell)
A hardware dongle actually makes the most sense to me...I don't know why
these aren't used more often. Ideally, I'd be able to install software on
as many machines/platforms as I have/want to, then I could just cary by
bluetooth dongle with me wherever I go and it would recognize me and allow
me to launch the software.
Dongles can be the "scariest" of protection schemes. Especially the darned
sentinels! We have more issues with sentinels than any other brand. The main
problem is that their hardware drivers aren't loaded by the time the items
in the StartUp group begin to run.... which means we have to shut the app
down, wait for the PC to "settle" and restart the app. I ended up writing a
little VB app that "sits and spins", waiting for the System Idle Process to
reach (a user configurable) 95% for 3 seconds (moving the mouse, harddrive
activity, etc, all effect System Idle)... when that's been successful, that
little VB app launches the app in question.
Plus, some hackers get a real thrill out of cracking dongles. It doesn't
matter what the app is or does, as long as it requires a dongle, they'll
want to take a crack at it.
If anyone "goes dongle", please make it a USB! Those darned parallel port
dongles require that you dig the PC out of its "warm and fuzzy" cubby hole
