On 24/07/2014 12:00 PM, Le_Forgeron wrote:
> On 24/07/2014 12:14, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>> But hey, you try explaining that to the PHB. All he wants to hear is "we
>> spent 8 years developing this stuff, I don't want somebody to press one
>> button, and be able to steal all our hard work". Not, of course, that an
>> obfuscater necessarily does that; I hear there are 1-click deobfustation
>> tools out there...
>
> Changing requirement at the end... a classical of bad management (hence
> PHB :-). It's not about "the code should not be stolen", but "how much
> are we willing to invest in to deter people from stealing it."
>
> If really worth it, smart part of the code is inside a dongle

You know, this technology already exists.

In order to run Steinburg Cubase, you have to plug in a little USB 
device. If you unplug it, the software instantly exits, losing all your 
work.

Now, I'm sure there's some way of defeating this protection system if 
you try hard enough. (Again, it comes down to finding the license code 
and removing it.) But it seems to work pretty well. No fiddly numbers to 
write down or license authorisation to manage. If you upgrade your PC, 
no problem. You want to run Cubase on your laptop? Sure! You only 
physically have one USB device, so you can only ever run one copy of the 
software, no matter how many times you install it...

The PHB has decided that this technology is too expensive for us to 
implement in our product. (To be fair, I have absolutely no idea what 
this stuff actually costs...)

> Short of that, you are just following the same path as Bluray's DRM:
> making life of honest customer painful, while adding nearly nothing
> against pirates. That's why I won't buy or even use a Bluray.

First, whether the code is obfuscated or not makes absolutely no 
different to the honest customer. None whatsoever. If anything, it just 
makes *my* life more painful when it doesn't work right. Second, I 
seriously doubt anybody will bother trying to pirate our software - so 
long as we make it too much hassle, that is. If you could just put the 
install DVD into 20 PCs and it works, people would PIRATE THE HELL out 
of it! But that doesn't work, and I suspect most of our customers are 
too stupid to work out why. And that's probably good enough.

If we were making Microsoft Word or something, this would NOT be good 
enough... but our product has a much smaller target audience.

Also: Isn't BRD DRM exactly like DVD DRM? (I.e., trivial to bypass.) Do 
you refuse to buy DVDs for the same reason?

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