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Comment by stonethrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Didn’t CAD automation software also adopt it? I remember MasterCam, SolidWorks and others needing hardware dongles.

The market for that is tiny compared to music but, the money made basically guaranteed given adoption rates. Even today I think there are too few contenders to pose a significant market risk to these companies.

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They did. I worked in a technical college in the 90s and Autodesk and others were huge fans of the single plugged into the serial port. Was a huge problem not only daisy chaining them all together but also they would get stolen if not secured. We’d ribbon cable them back inside the case where’d there would be a many inches of dongle precariously joined. Fond memories.

I think these have modernised, because SolidWorks now uses floating e-licenses for example.

From a consumer perspective hardware dongles are mega-problematic right now because of the USB C vs USB A debacle on new laptops, and also because many AVs now block USB devices by default and require ITS admin to unblock it.

From a distributor perspective, they require shipping physical product to customers which reduces margins and can take weeks, especially-so when you talk about shipping from overseas.

CAD/CAM has mostly been FlexLM protected for as long as I remember. Flex used a hardware dongle for a while, but then moved away from it.

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