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Personally I found LimeLM offering a pretty amazing and sophisticated product at very decent prices. Personally, I would never want to suffer the pain of keepin

Personally I found LimeLM offering a pretty amazing and sophisticated product at very decent prices. Personally, I would never want to suffer the pain of keeping licensing servers running etc. :-) In my experience, software licensing will just “get rid of the casual piracy” - but I could never see not having a licensing solution in software work for business... Beyond protecting software I found it similarly necessary to take down illegal software copies. There are automated tools for that luckily. Yeah, your software will be cracked sooner or later. But it is not all black and white and there are now really great sophisticated solutions out there that minimize the frustration for paying customers whilst also protecting your IP...

toyg 6y ago
> I could never see not having a licensing solution in software work for business The most business-y of business-y tech businesses, Oracle, doesn't use license keys. Everyone can download pretty much any of their products. When they acquired the company I worked for, the first thing they did was to release master licenses to everyone for free. Saved us peons in the support trenches the aggro of dealing with a terrible license-server we embedded, the name of which I've mercifully forgotten. How do they do it? Their audience are legitimate businesses who would rather stay on the right side of the law than save a few pennies here and there. And Oracle won't answer the phone unless you have a paid support contract. Obviously this model won't work for everyone, but IMHO businesses who sell to businesses can live happily without license keys (and the stress/costs they generate on their support operations).
- rahimnathwani 6y ago
  Oracle does not rely on companies' good intention, or their need for ongoing support. They use contracts and audits to make sure they get what they're owed. If you can force companies to pay after they start using something, then making it as easy as possible for them to expand usage is going to maximise your revenue. Google 'Oracle License Audit' or 'Oracle LMS' to learn more.
  - toyg 6y ago
    Man, I worked for them, I know the score :) And that's precisely what I said: they just use the law ("contracts"). Legitimate businesses don't want problems with the law. It's more effective, for Oracle, to carefully draft (and subsequently enforce) legal documents, than to add some rigamarole that will only make life harder for legitimate clients and their own support ops.
    - rahimnathwani 6y ago
      Right, but the cost of enforcement doesn't scale linearly with licence cost. If your median customer spends millions with you per year, you can afford to spend money on enforcement. If your median customer spends $10k/year, I don't see how you can compel them to submit to an audit, or how you can get positive ROI from enforcement activities. This is one of the benefits of SaaS (for sellers).
      - toyg 6y ago
        You’d be surprised how far a couple of graceful but stern legal-looking template letters can go. Of course SaaS is a solution, but that doesn’t really apply to the type of software that requires license keys (i.e. standalone and likely behind the firewall).
mmis1000 6y ago
> ...that minimize the frustration for paying customers whilst also protecting your IP... Media publishers generally do the reverse. Make the customer pain in the ass (like require expensive hardware and software that needs to pay every year) only to play your blueray disk. While pirates don't need to suffer and just play it as they want everywhere because they obviously won't copy those shit.

toyg 6y ago

> I could never see not having a licensing solution in software work for business The most business-y of business-y tech businesses, Oracle, doesn't use license keys. Everyone can download pretty much any of their products. When they acquired the company I worked for, the first thing they did was to release master licenses to everyone for free. Saved us peons in the support trenches the aggro of dealing with a terrible license-server we embedded, the name of which I've mercifully forgotten. How do they do it? Their audience are legitimate businesses who would rather stay on the right side of the law than save a few pennies here and there. And Oracle won't answer the phone unless you have a paid support contract. Obviously this model won't work for everyone, but IMHO businesses who sell to businesses can live happily without license keys (and the stress/costs they generate on their support operations).

rahimnathwani 6y ago
Oracle does not rely on companies' good intention, or their need for ongoing support. They use contracts and audits to make sure they get what they're owed. If you can force companies to pay after they start using something, then making it as easy as possible for them to expand usage is going to maximise your revenue. Google 'Oracle License Audit' or 'Oracle LMS' to learn more.
- toyg 6y ago
  Man, I worked for them, I know the score :) And that's precisely what I said: they just use the law ("contracts"). Legitimate businesses don't want problems with the law. It's more effective, for Oracle, to carefully draft (and subsequently enforce) legal documents, than to add some rigamarole that will only make life harder for legitimate clients and their own support ops.
  - rahimnathwani 6y ago
    Right, but the cost of enforcement doesn't scale linearly with licence cost. If your median customer spends millions with you per year, you can afford to spend money on enforcement. If your median customer spends $10k/year, I don't see how you can compel them to submit to an audit, or how you can get positive ROI from enforcement activities. This is one of the benefits of SaaS (for sellers).
    - toyg 6y ago
      You’d be surprised how far a couple of graceful but stern legal-looking template letters can go. Of course SaaS is a solution, but that doesn’t really apply to the type of software that requires license keys (i.e. standalone and likely behind the firewall).

mmis1000 6y ago

> ...that minimize the frustration for paying customers whilst also protecting your IP... Media publishers generally do the reverse. Make the customer pain in the ass (like require expensive hardware and software that needs to pay every year) only to play your blueray disk. While pirates don't need to suffer and just play it as they want everywhere because they obviously won't copy those shit.