The biggest dongle of them all: the internet | Hacker News Reader

The biggest dongle of them all: the internet

3 pointsjustintocci3 comments

Saas is a form of copy protection. It's a dongle. Adobe is using it. Salesforce. Facebook. Even Hacker News. So please, let's not pretend that software is defective when its copy protected. The difference between a business that uses some form of copy protection and one that does not is measured in millions of dollars. I asked a question about this a while ago and got crickets so allow me to rephrase.

You use copy protected software every single day of your life so you surely have an opinion on what works and what does not. I have a program that will run on a server near a Postgresql database. It's a mobile and web-enabled developer tool similar to pgadmin3. What would be best practice for copy protection? The best we've come up with is a phone home scheme. We'd like it to be as transparent to the user as possible.

There's a great big whopping difference between the Adobe example and Facebook. One of them (facebook) the product is the network. It is inherently uncopyable. The other (Adobe) the "network" is bodged on to try to extract just the "uncopyable" attribute without providing any value and, in fact, causing a great deal of value to be lost by invalidating many use cases of the product (archival, offline, etc).

Its not about copy protection vs not, its about how much of your customers' resources and goodwill you are prepared to burn and how much value you are prepared to subtract from your product in order add that "uncopyable" attribute.

Copy protection isn't free. If you choose it, its likely to end up being your most expensive feature to add and support while simultaneously making your product less valuable to your customers.

How much of my customer's resources and goodwill we are prepared to sacrifice: none

How much value we are prepared to subtract from the product: none

Those questions are answered. The question we need answered is, what is best practice? Should we really try to go saas? Are developers going to feel comfortable entering their database credentials into a third party site? I think not. There must be an answer here, a sweet spot in the middle.

Whoa dude, I totally disagree with the statement that 'the network', which you refer to as the 'product' of Facebook is not able to be copied. In one sense, Google has made the entire Internet searchable. In another sense, I think it would be possible to put together a decentralized Facebook, sort of a specification for blogs, that could replace Facebook under the right conditions. I could go on.

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