dhbailey / 05.3.10 / 06:59 AM wrote: >One thought occurs, which might actually be a good business venture to >begin: Somebody could establish a company whose sole purpose is to >issue validation or authentication codes for software, all independent >of the original publishers of those applications.
I was not going to pitch in this thread, but now I have to. There has been such business, a company called PACE. If I am not mistaken, Finale used to use PACE floppy disk auth. PACE <http://www.paceap.com/> has been supplying anti piracy engine for many, many DAW applications for decades. Steinburg, Waves, BombFactory to name a few. It is even easier to count who _left_ PACE. MOTU did (but came back with MachFive and MX4). Peak and Logic did, too. Here is the problem with such business. PACE provides API/lib, which hacks deep inside of the host code so altering its code makes app malfunction. The problem is they don't take any responsibility how the host app implement it. And their customer is not the end user but the app vendor. If we are in trouble, they don't care for us. I was there. Here is an example. Take a non PACE DAW app. You use PACE enabled plug-in. If the timing of memory return is a hair off, the app crashes, and is caused by PACE. In such event, this is what happens: - PACE claims the app vendor never asked for help to solve the problem so they can't do anything about it, and also claims PACE provided more than enough API/documentation so the app vendor should be able to handle the problem in many ways. - The app vendor claims they paid big money to PACE so they don't want to worry about anti piracy issue. P.S. When Peak was the only OSX DAW app a few years back, its auth all the sudden died on me _on the stage_ of the Umbria Jazz Festival. Of course I left my auth at hotel! I cursed Peak and I trashed it. Back then, Peak3 sounded terrible anyway. I hear version 4 got better but I aint going there again. -- - Hiro Hiroaki Honshuku, A-NO-NE Music, Boston, MA <http://a-no-ne.com> <http://anonemusic.com> _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
