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Comment by Nexxxeh | Hacker News Reader

Is it not more "VST author just does the bare minimum to keep honest people honest, because more invasive DRM risks ruining a live performance"? I'm not understanding why TFA author has such an attitude about this. Is the VST author a horrible person or running a toxic business model or something?

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> I'm not understanding why TFA author has such an attitude about this

To me it reads like an ego trip rather than any kind of righteous vendetta against the author. Implicit in "look at the dumb thing this other person did" is "I'm smarter than them because I noticed the dumb thing".

I think the VST author and the DRM vendor are different people and the author is poking fun at the latter. It’s possible that the VST author isn’t aware that the fancy DRM protection they paid for doesn’t cover runtime.

I think the VST author knew that fine, but they figured that:

1) Protecting the installer will take care of most casual piracy

2) Protecting the VST might lead to unpredictable performance and issues on something that needs to run in real-time

So they chose to only protect the installer, which seems like a very user-friendly choice. I both enjoyed the writeup and want to second supporting the developer by buying a license.

That’s also possible, and even if that were the case I don’t see how this article is even tangentially saying that the VST author is a bad person or toxic or whatever the comment I was responding to mentioned.

It’s kind of a rote “this is a bad implementation” post that’s pretty obviously about the DRM vendor and not the guy that made a bass boost plugin for djs or whatever it is.

And furthermore, if a product designed to protect my income was only $200, I wouldn’t expect “serious security”, I’d expect exactly The kind of janky crap that was received.

They didn't even get into the actual protection itself. It may well be terrible, but it being xcopy-able is not the protection vendor's fault.

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