Pirates is the cost of doing business. Just ignore them.
No need to make this too complicated.
Source: me, I do this way.
There are a lot of cracking groups that circumvent license servers on day one with software that have license servers.
I'm sure this is the reason that Adobe went to the cloud, Adobe couldn't ignore them as with other 'box software'.
How does the reason you provide support the idea you provide it in support of? There are an infinite number of things that are sold as single purchases that you buy by just navigating to a website where you make the purchase.
There are an infinite number of things that are sold as single purchases on CDs that you buy by just navigating to a website where you make the purchase.
I think this is too broad a stroke to paint with. There's local-first software that still connects to the cloud for additional features. Local-first can enable you to continue to work when offline, but the software can still be more useful when online.
Did I misunderstand this part? A lot of local software is sold as one time purchase downloads.
But over time and multiple hard-to-recover incidents they switched to cloud.
Now that cloud hype has died down, I don't see why subscription based would not be viable just because your product runs locally (assuming that all your competitors are already subscription based). ZBrush started selling local first subscriptions, so I guess we'll see soon enough whether that works out for them.
My understanding was that they switched to being centralized because phones couldn't run the decentralized version.