[devwastaken]

Piracy affects smaller companies far more than large ones, and that's where the discussion gets muddied.

In my view we don't talk about product protection enough, and instead resort to dunking on DRM all the time. Instead of talking about DRM and how it is legitimately problematic I'd like to highlight that we can protect products without DRM and still sell them - it's why products have gone to online accounts for seemingly offline software.

Of course this can be broken, the same as DRM, but done right online features can become a core part of a software and make it so offline patches remove a significant enough amount of feature that it's not worth it.

It is sadly a natural order of things. In my experience when I was younger I legitimately could not have gotten into graphic design and learned enough about it without the big name products. The pricing for something like adobe has become so far outside of reason that people will pay for the crack rather than the subscription as an example.

[freedomben]

> it's why products have gone to online accounts for seemingly offline software.

Very interesting theory. My theory so far has been that it's been because:

1. Data mining/data accumulation/data reselling

2. For so many devs web is what they know, so they naturally think in those terms

3. You can release updates/new versions way, way faster if much of the app is on your server

4. Future flexibility

I definitely think your theory belongs on the list. I'm wondering how impactful that is. Could be pretty big.

[native_samples]

I think it's pretty impactful but people don't like to talk about it or even think about it explicitly. Rather, what people observe is that the really rich companies seem to mostly make their money by selling online services or like Apple, by selling hardware. As the latter is very difficult and often unjustifiable for what could be a pure software solution, people just come to associate cloud service=success and it the underlying factors become under-analyzed.

I think they also realize that whilst geeks will kick up a stink about "DRM" when it's done client side, the exact same thing implemented by a firewall and server rules draws no attention. So it's seen as more socially respectable, although in reality of course, software+DRM gives much better privacy than a cloud service ever can.

In reality of course, lots of very rich companies make offline or mostly offline software. Microsoft, Oracle, SAP etc. But they're unfashionable.