|---------------------------------------------------------------------------| |"In article , ChrisQuayle says... | |> Chris, it's not just the problems with dongles and flexlm etc that | |> irritates. It's the business relationship where i am being asked to | |> shell out thousands and put my trust in the vendor to provide timely and | |> accurate support, while at the same time, the dongles etc tell me that | |> they don't trust me. | | | |Absolutely." | |---------------------------------------------------------------------------|
Sheesh, they do not trust everybody. They are not necessarily saying that you will steal, but somebody would steal. You are entitled to resent dongles (and complaints such as a dongle might malfunction or become lost are valid), but being insulted that all customers are given a dongle each is something I deem to be an overreaction. For example, a landlord from who I rented accommodation and shared a yard with was insulted that I locked a vehicle because he would not steal it. If I ever visit you, please do not think that I necessarily suspect that you will steal my vehicle if I lock it. Someone else could steal it otherwise. Similarly, any time I have taken an opaque bag into a shop and a staffmember of the shop requested to look into the bag, I was not being accused of stealing and I was not insulted: checking whether I stole something was a perfectly legitimate goal of the shop's staff. Similarly in other shops, entering with one's own bags is forbidden: this again is not an accusation that everyone is a thief, but it might prevent some thefts. I may find it inconvenient that I may not enter a particular shop with a bag of my own, but just as a dongle may be inconvenient, it is not necessarily enough for me to be insulted and invoke a boycott.
|---------------------------------------------------------------------------| |"There is also some element of self fulfilling prophecy here. A "If I'm | |going to be treated as a wolf I might a well behave as one" reaction | |some people will have. [..]" | |---------------------------------------------------------------------------|
Perhaps. However, whether something is priced cheaply or expensively, people will still moan that it costs too much and will steal it: e.g. on
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in 1984 someone moaned: "[..] Why do software houses have to charge so much for their software tapes? Most tapes are priced around five to six pounds, [..]
[..]"
If things cost even less, people will still steal them but they might not try some pathetic excuse such as the cost. E.g. many Spectrum tapes had even cheaper prices but piracy was a problem, so the company named Ultimate Play the Game increased its prices to far higher than average such that people would be deterred from giving away something which cost a lot of money. (This was mentioned in Keith Ainsworth's excellent article for his magazine "Retrogamer", but it does not seem to be in the gratis excerpt on
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.) Raising the prices may have resulted in people using the high prices as an excuse to illegally copy the games.
|---------------------------------------------------------------------------| |"Certainly piracy occurs. I would, maybe naively, hope that embedded | |development tools would be less prone to that than desktop software. | |[..] | | | |[..]" | |---------------------------------------------------------------------------|
Embedded development tools are also stolen. Perhaps they are less prone to this, but I do not understand how that would be. Bad people exist. The extensive amount of theft of software which is not bespoke software would scare me from trying to make a living programming for a domain populated by thieves.
Regards, Colin Paul Gloster