bear <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Wed, 18 Sep 2002, Peter wrote: > > >Hi Pete - I'm confused. Are you suggesting that I should enjoy these > >freedoms on SW which I don't have legal rights to? > > In emergencies, yes.
This brings to mind my youth, in which I worked for a wall street firm in which we systematically cracked the copy protection and license managers on SunOS software we were using. Was it to pirate the software? No. We paid for every license. It was because the manufacturers had neglected to consider that in a 24x7 environment having a machine go down meant that we needed to bring the software up on hosts other than the one originally licensed, and we didn't have time to wait until Monday when everyone got back to their office and give us a new key. A few small kernel patches allowed us to routinely tell programs that the host id was whatever we wanted them to think it was. I recently have heard tell from friends of similar systematic uses of cracked Microsoft software at a number of places -- not because these places pirate the software, but because they can't deal with the constant failures that the increasingly belligerent M$ copy restrictions bring. Customers need to get work done, and the copy protections get in the way. XP is particularly egregious in this regard, but some people are getting around this with cracking tools, even though they pay for their software legitimately. One wonders if better license enforcement might not be a good thing, since it would doubtless finish off Microsoft by eliminating the ability of their legitimate customers to evade their license enforcement software, thus driving them to use open source products. Perry --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
