License / Registration key enabled software

[Paul Boddie]

Mike Playle wrote:
> Worry instead about the people who DON'T want to use it illegitimately. Can a license key
> scheme help them?

That's "help them" as in "we can help you to stay in our good books and
avoid us dragging you through the courts, you bad people", I presume?
Hardly a vendor-customer relationship I'd want to get into as the
customer.

I've had experience with both hardware protection schemes (unreliable)
and floating licences (annoying, since users tend to "drop anchor"),
and both schemes penalise the people who've paid for (or have been
bought) software whilst supposedly inconveniencing those who will
nevertheless have cracked the software within a short period of time
before exchanging it with friends and strangers. So, the software will
probably roam around of its own accord, anyway. Here, the moderating
factor in propagation is (or should be amongst people with any degree
of cautiousness) the lack of trust in the cracked product: what malware
also gets installed along with the original software?

Meanwhile, the big company scenario that advocates of restrictive
technical licensing solutions like to mention actually suggests
incompetence in the management of customer relations at such companies:
you sell the big company five licences of your software because they
tell you that's all they need, but you secretly suspect that everyone
is using the software. But any interest in the number of people using
the software is presumably driven by some per-seat pricing that could
be totally inappropriate. Some desire to have a 1980s-style
shrinkwrapped box retail price tag has constrained the business's
ability to judge the value of the software on a case-by-case basis,
which you'd want to do with important customers. The big company might
not be an important customer as it turns out, but by focusing on the
relationship itself, rather than auditing and threatening them, you
might actually get a chance to find this out in a way which presents
opportunities other than a face-off in court.

Interestingly, the innovation in this area would seem to be happening
either in companies offering dual-licensed solutions, where one of the
licences is the GPL, or even in companies only offering GPL-licensed
solutions but with paid support options available in addition. That's
how stagnant the style of proprietary software business referred to
here would appear to be with respect to business innovation these days.

Paul