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Comment by int3 | Hacker News Reader

seems like crackers could just patch the app code that detects this, no?

For sure, it’s just a bit more effort to reverse the app binary and find that part of the code. Enough effort to deter most crackers apparently.

The macOS cracking scene is also much much weaker. It's

1. Mildly harder on a OS level

2. Less popular in countries that produce the most cracks

3. Less popular in general

4. Has an audience that is demonstrably more likely to pay for software

5. Has less strong reverse engineering software. Hopper was awful.

Also, I just wanted to say I love your work. I've learned a lot from your blog, your free trial strategies are interesting, and quite effective: https://shottr.cc/s/1vQa/SCR-20240423-re6.png

ida pro has a Mac release

As does Ghidra or Binary Ninja.

> 4. Has an audience that is demonstrably more likely to pay for software

The flip side of this is that I've noticed software written solely for macOS/iOS is often more polished than many of the most popular FOSS projects written for Linux.

Obviously I don't have any expectation of software provided for free, but as someone who makes a living developing software I do find it funny how much reticence there is among other developers to pay for high quality software.

I am a developer who likes to be paid for my work. I was also a diehard FOSS fan. I've also switched to macOS, and after I did so I spent probably $200 on software. What was interesting to me is that even in my Linux phase, some proprietary software was acceptable — notably steam. Why was this the case?

I think, as a developer, I value the ability to fix things I don't like. I've done it quite a lot in open source software. Just plant my fix and move on. Steam always felt complete. macOS software often feels closer to completion, though sometimes I do wish I could modify it still. Also, another class is software I trust that I could not do a better job on, like Affinity.

Anyway, I think that's the root of the developer aversion to paying for software.... Well, for me anyway. I wish we had better culture around donating to free software as well.

I have an aversion for paying for artificially scarce things. I am happy to "pay for software" if that software doesn't exist yet, and what I'm actually paying for is the labor to make it.

Quite convenient that you’d only pay software if developers contacted you years in advance, and none of them were clever enough to do so

My mechanic doesn't speculatively contact me about work I should do on my car. If I want new software that I can't write myself, I should reach out to developers, not the other way around.

Does this extend to books? movies? games?

I would extend it to the words in a book, but not the book itself. That is a physical object and therefore has real scarcity. Similarly for movies and games.

Though I'm actually not against paying for access to stream media. I am however against telling people what they can do with the media once they stream it (ie saving it to their own drive for future playback).

So if you're not against paying for access to media, why are you against paying for access to software? If you're against DRM, that's an argument I can support more

I guess I'm not against paying for access to software, it's just that the consequence of being against restricting what people can do with it once they have it (such as redistribute it) makes paying for access seem unrealistic.

Paying for access to a media repository makes slightly more sense than paying for access a to software repository also, just given the sheer amount of data that media tends to take up vs how much data software tends to use. GNU software repositories are fairly easily hosted by hobbyists; multi-billion dollar companies often burn money trying to monetize media storage and distribution (particularly video). In that sense, there is some scarcity in media distribution. Software distribution trends to be next to nothing though.

I am also certainly against DRM, as I am any malware :P

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