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AnonTechie writes:
"Echoing a question asked on programmers.stackexchange.com - How can software be protected from piracy ?
It just seems a little hard to believe that with all of our technological advances and the billions of dollars spent on engineering the most unbelievable and mind-blowing software, we still have no other means of protecting against piracy than a "serial number/activation key." I'm sure a ton of money, maybe even billions, went into creating Windows 7 or Office and even Snow Leopard, yet I can get it for free in less than 20 minutes. Same for all of Adobe's products, which are probably the easiest. Can there exist a fool-proof and hack-proof method of protecting your software against piracy? If not realistically, could it be theoretically possible? Or no matter what mechanisms these companies deploy, can hackers always find a way around it ?"
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday March 22 2014, @06:46AM
It doesn't matter how much effort you put into it if there is no market for it. The truth is there is very little market for photo-editing software and even quality word-processing and spreadsheets. These are professional tools that people just like using as long as they don't have to pay for them.
The people that are buying them do so because everyone else seem to be using them and they don't know how to pirate them. Once all the semi-competent high-school students start installing Linux and LibreOffice since they can't get Word for free, how long would it take before everyone else follow suit? This isn't even a rhetorical question anymore since we've seen this happen with Google Docs.
TL;DR: Just because you're spending 30yr creating the ultimate word processor, doesn't mean 99% of word processor users need it or are willing to pay for it.