My first run-in with a product activation type of scheme happened several years ago with GlobalSCAPE's CuteFTP. My wife purchased a copy which was installed a handful of times: On Her workstation, after the semi-annual to annual reinstall of the OS for motherboard upgrades or general Windows stability issues, and once or twice on two laptops (install on laptop #1, wipe and reinstall, wipe with restore-disk and donate laptop, wash-rinse-repeat with new laptop #2).
Unknown to either of us (probably buried in the middle of the novella-length EULA, which I now always take the time to decipher), CuteFTP would phone home each time it was installed and tick a counter. After reaching some predetermined limit, it refused to install, with the error "registration limit exceeded". I was furious! I had to call their tech support, explain the problem, and justify my need to have the limit increased.
GlobalSCAPE will never see another penny from us, and I will do my best to convince others to pursue alternatives -- such as the excellent freeware/donateware SmartFTP.
After several years of purchasing the Small Business editions of TurboTax, I went with TaxCut for 2003, and will never go back to Intuit. The constant upsells were bad enough -- the Product Activation scheme was outrageous.
The virus definition "subscription" for NAV (Symantec) expired on my wife's machine about a week ago. Now that they're adding product activation to new releases, preposterously to protect ME from piracy, I'll be buying from another company. I just sent off a sales inquiry to Trend Micro earlier this evening.
Macromedia is also losing another formerly loyal, paying customer of Dreamweaver Ultravdev 4 & Dreamweaver MX, thanks to the product activation in MX2004. (Truthfully, it wouldn't have taken much to push me in that direction after their asinine site redesign anyhow. Macromedia Exchange is now unequivocally useless).
I have an old NT4 server still kicking along, performing quite well for what it does. I won't complain about Microsoft EOL-ing it -- it's understandable and I can't expect a company to support software forever -- but when it does finally come time to upgrade, it won't be with Windows Server 2003. Any idea why? Which raises another point: I'm far from the only person still using NT4. If I need to reinstall, no problem. (Over three years on one install, incidentally. Color me amazed). What happens when XP or WS2003 is End-of-Lifed? Will Microsoft allow you to reactivate if necessary?
My business is computers. I recommend and advise against software to hundreds of people a year. Publishers, are you listening? When hacked versions of your software are available five minutes after release (if not sooner), product activation be damned, do you really think it will put a dent in piracy? Is it worth turning people like me away in the hopes of recouping a few dollars?
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