I had a similar situation for a company that purchased it's accounting software way back in the first 90ies, which tied the software to an hw dongle. In spite

I had a similar situation for a company that purchased it's accounting software way back in the first 90ies, which tied the software to an hw dongle. In spite of the old system, the software works absolutely fine and there were no reasons to upgrade or change. In fact, the hardware it was running on was upgraded several times. Until one day, the dongle broke (a bump by the cleaning staff cracked it apparently). The company behind the software went bankrupt years ago, and there was no way to either obtain a new dongle or extract the data from the software (custom db as well). The software was easy to crack by just nop'ing a couple of bytes, but the owner of the company was absolutely shocked by the experience as they reverted to paper archives for about a week with no easy way out. I was quite young at the time and it served me as a life lesson. Since then I never used or considered anything with DRM, remote licensing or SaaS for exactly that reason. I never had trouble finding alternatives either.