This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Activation = DeActivation? Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

Ed Foster points out that some of the more onerous DRM/Copy protection schemes out there may well backfire on the vendors:

Of course, even those product activation schemes that have been with us a while don't get any sweeter with age. A reader who had just moved his old copy of Microsoft Office and separate copies of Publisher and FrontPage to a new laptop wound up having to exchange the machine for another configuration. "When I got the new one I had to reinstall all the software, and that's when I ran into Microsoft's silly activation scheme. Not only did I have to activate the products, but I had to complete three separate activations, because of the different versions of the software I had on my system. Have you ever gone through Microsoft's phone activation? It's a trip! You have to spend close to ten minutes dealing with voice recognition software before you're told that the machine can't activate the software and it then passes you to a human being. And I had to make three separate calls, as Microsoft considers them three separate installations. All in all, it took about an hour to reactivate three products."

There's a fine line between you need to pay for this product and we assume everyone is a dirty rotten scoundrel until proven otherwise. It seems that a lot of vendors are running across that line, without ever considering the potential backlash.