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Replying To:
But it does have to be risky[ Parent ] (none / 0) (#14)
by enderlyn on Wed Feb 28, 2007 at 09:33:00 AM PDT

Sorry, but Adobe, Microsoft, and others make the same claims you are making and we know they are dead wrong, at least for some users. If some of the largest software makers on the planet can't get it right, why should we believe you can?

As a developer myself I certainly understand the damage piracy can do to a software company. I also understand that the software industry has been cultivating ill-will toward it from its customer base for years with declining quality, declining support, and unbalanced licensing. DRM, whatever the short term gain may be for vendors, over the long term serves only to reinforce the impression among our customers that we, as an industry, don't give a damn about them. This is because DRM/activation is becoming synonymous with the restriction of customer rights and vendor arrogance.

Seriously, the whole 'keeping honest customers honest' phrase is the biggest bunch of insulting bag of nonsense I have ever heard in my life. If I am an honest customer I am, by definition, intrinsically so. I do not need to be 'kept' honest by my software vendor. So even if your DRM is 100% flawless and transparent I, as an honest user, would find its presence insulting because of the presumption all DRM makes: that I am a would be thief.

Beyond that, ther is the following list of issues that seem to crop up with all DRM/activation implementations:

- Adds an additional failure point to worry about.

- Adds a risk of de facto sun-setting should the vendor stop supporting activation for older versions.

- Adds a risk of loss of use should the vendor go under or product support dropped.

- Adds a risk of a drastic, unacceptable changes in activation terms should the vendor be purchased or has a change in management (or management's attitudes).

- May have problems working with specific hardware configurations, which adds an additional risk to configuration changes, upgrades, or repairs.

- May be too dependent on how the current version of the OS is implemented and fail when patches are installed or the OS is upgraded (XP Service Pack2 and Vista, anyone?).

- May have problems interacting with other vendors' DRM implementations.

- May have problems interacting with other software.

- May interact badly with certain drivers.

The first five of these are specific to DRM, but you could claim the remaining five could apply to any piece of softwrae. I understand that. But DRM must be viewed as separate because it is an additional point failure. In other words: though a specific app may not be impaired by any of these problems in a given installation, the DRM used to protect it might thus preventing the app from running. This leads to lost productivity, lost time, potential support hassles, and more.

This is why I believe that if you make decisions for an IT organization and you purchase and use mission critical software that employs DRM/activation mechanisms in your company for which viable DRM-free alternatives exists, then you are not doing your job because you are unnecessarily putting your company at risk.

[ Parent ]


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