Re: Roadmap Review - My Questions

I.P. Nichols wrote:

"Brion L. Webster" wrote:
I.P. Nichols wrote:

I'm sure you are aware that there are "activation cracker" pgms that will ameliorate that fear and perhaps you should stockpile one while they are still available on the internet.

Shhhh. I would never espouse such a thing. I'm plenty aware of them - but honestly, who knows what else they're installing on my system?

Well before shhing me and telling me you would never espouse such a thing as if it were illegal and unethical, let us remember the exact context of my suggestion - you were expressing a real fear that sometime in the future you wouldn't be able to activate and register an older fully licensed legal version of Delphi because the activation and registration service had been discontinued.

And there hasn't been a history of activation crackers installing malware, it's shareware and freeware that has the bad history of installing undesirable malware.

I *did* intend for some sarcasm to slip in there, it wasn't supposed to be a personal insult. But it appears it came across that way. I'm sorry.

On the one hand, I have to defend the right of a customer who purchased a license to a product to continue using the product, essentially "in perpetuity". There's a very real danger, with the product hard coded to point to a borland.com IP address, that something won't work right at some point, and BDS won't be registerable. That's assuming DTG doesn't fold, or the new owners don't decide to discontinue BDS, de-support older versions, etc. Any activation-based product has the same issues.

On the other hand, I can not advise my employer or any other company to depend on technically illegal solutions to this dilemma. A code escrow service would be a partial solution - as long as the complete build environment was also in escrow, with the ability to strip the activation sequence out and recompile. But I haven't heard of any major dev tools company agreeing to something like this.

The closest thing I've heard is TurboPower releasing unlocked versions of it's products when they exited the commercial components business. I could *hope* for the same largesse, should the unfortunate happen, but I suspect the lawyers would bury the assets of the company, hoping to recoup revenue off the sale of them, or raising the "it might contain someone else's IP" flag again.

I detest activation with a passion - but I see no recourse as a customer. Everyone should have a risk mitigation plan in place.

--
-Brion

There's no such thing as 'one, true way;'
- Mercedes Lackey
.

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