At 4:46 PM -0700 5/16/06, Scott Haneda wrote:
I never have felt any of this anti-piracy stuff does anything more than bug the legit users. Pirated software is not directly related to a lost sale.
I couldn't agree more. Then again, I'm not in the business of selling software, so that's pretty easy for me to say.
We are all legit users here, I would bet no one would be willing to circumvent the nag screen...
There I disagree. If I were in a situation where the nag screen were blocking what I felt to be my legitimate use of the product, I'd look for a way to disable it. As a related example, I own a copy of "Railroad Tycoon 3" which won't run without the CD-ROM in the drive. This is an anti-piracy measure, of course. All it does is check to see if the disc is in the drive when you launch the game, and then it never references it again. There was no warning of this before I bought the game, and its presence annoys me. So I went actively looking for a way to circumvent this, because I don't want to haul a CD around the country just to play a game when I'm bored in an airport or what-have-you. It's too easy to lose the disc and then never be able to play the game again. Now, whether Evan's use case constitutes legitimate use of the product is a matter of some debate (no, really?). He clearly feels it is, whereas others disagree. Once I factored out the tone of his messages, I found myself mostly agreeing with Evan. Then again, it IS actually generous of Bare Bones to allow a single-user copy to run on more than one machine at a time. Any of the applications in my copy of Microsoft Office sure don't allow that. The discrepancy between the BBEdit and Yojimbo licenses is interesting, though. Have I waffled enough yet? It's my usual curse: being able to see the viewpoints of both sides, and recognize that both are legitimately held and supportable. From where I sit, it seems like a dialog that lets you remotely quit (with save-and-close of documents, of course!) one of the conflicting copies of BBEdit would be a helpful addition. I can envision people engaging it "quit wars" over a network, but in that situation you'd have multiple people using a single-user license copy fighting over who got to use it, which means they'd be all in defiance of the license and so deserve to have their fellow pirates quitting their copies.
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