Activation--The final frontier

MSoft and SWX will argue that Activation stops piracy. We had more
trouble with pirated MSoft this year than ever before. The pirates of
XP were so good at faking the disks that we had to look long and hard
at minute details to figure it out. During last years teaching
assignment a couple students kept begging to teach SWX because they had
it at home as warez and liked it. Legitimate companies are going to buy
software, at least in the US. Kids and private individuals are going
continue to obtain warez no matter what MSoft and SWX do because
somebody is going to find a way around activation and anything else
they do. Can you imagine a company with, say 100 seats of SWX, trying
to do it with warez? It would be an administrative nightmare. And the
cracking of SWX can't be that bad because SWX doesn't ship in sealed
shrink wrap with holographic logos and long alpha-numeric strings for
serial numbers.

Outside of the US it is a different story. Some countries have such a
rampant cracking problem that the paid seat of SWX is probably the
exception. I have looked into the mindset in some of these countries
and found that the people there simply don't view this as being wrong.
Their mindset is that it is wrong for SWX not to provide them with what
they need to earn a living. Therefore it is OK to take it when needed.
These people come from countries with a strong socialist tradition of
the government giving them everything at little or no cost.

 

I noted that there are people in the US that use warez. However, they
are not generally the people that would go out and buy SWX in the first
place. I really don't know of any company wide uses of cracked SWX on
either a large or small scale in the US. In fact I don't know of any
company wide abuses although I have seen VARs make "exceptions" with
certain customers on a limited basis.

In your case where you have a desktop system and a laptop, how do you
work it? Do you have two licenses?

 

Just from my viewpoint, I can accept running only one copy of
SolidWorks at a time, with my single license. I maintain a 2nd copy of
SolidWorks on my MacBook Pro, so I can run SWks when I am "out" in the
field or shop and not have to take two laptops with me. I have not yet
seen a need to run Swks on both laptops at the same time.

I gave up on desktops 10 years ago, as laptops are competent enough for
all my work, as I don't do large assemblies.

I would like to be able to launch earlier SWks versions, if I really
had to do so, without having to jump through high hoops.

I just hope the SWks policy does NOT turn draconian. In the 3rd world
it is different & I can see the problem with CAD in the 3rd world.

A friend used to work for Unigraphics and described being sent to China
to conduct a "training course" after Unigraphics agree to do a 'bulk'
license for the Chinese governmental companies in Beijing in the late
80s-early 90s. This was after it was obvious that thousands of seats
were pirated and an agreement was made to make them ALL legal.

The exhibition hall for training could hold maybe a thousand people or
something like that, and they sent out the notice about the official
training class presentation...and something like 5-10,000 people showed
up to attend the class.

The amount of pirated copies of software was horribly underestimated by
Unigraphics.

Bo