Community effort to replace iLok?

[soundmodel]

Anyone know the business statistics of Pace?

I didn't find anything. Just wanted to know how much they might be racking up with their business.

[soundmodel]

I think you miss that one of the main reasons for a transfer fee is also the fact that you lose a potential new customer. In addition, you have to pay employees who provide support for the new owner. Simply put: one sold, two or even three times the support effort. The administrative burden of managing and protecting customer data can also mean high administrative costs, depending on how many hundreds or thousands of licenses are in circulation.
This all isn’t going away by itself, but usually has to be checked manually. And there are costs again.
Would you take over this management for a company free of charge?

As of now I believe that such system can be entirely automatic. Just that it might be more downstripped than iLok.

[mtytel]

So that made me think that would some people perhaps be interested in designing and conceiving a community-led alternative copy protection to iLok? Like a GNU iLok?

The *last* thing the GNU community would ever do is make DRM software.

[BertKoor]

The *last* thing the GNU community would ever do is make DRM software.

Are you sure?

https://github.com/PELock/PELock-Softwa ... ensing-SDK
https://github.com/TimSC/rsa-license-key
https://github.com/Vladimir-Novick/Get-License-Code

[soundmodel]

Well, to enforce any other than public domain license, then at least the developers using DRM think that they need DRM.

So rather than argue that "hey you shouldn't use DRM", what would be approriate, would be to design "GNU-compatible" DRM.

[Chaotikmind]

So, you're gonna make open source DRM ? that works?
i'm taking some popcorn and watching how you do that.

[soundmodel]

So, you're gonna make open source DRM ? that works?
i'm taking some popcorn and watching how you do that.

Obviously it'd be DRM that's closed in so far it's required for security.

You didn't read what I wrote earlier. I think GNU would be idiotic, if it meant "hey devs you ought to not use DRM", because that's not going to happen.

[dellboy]

What is the purpose of i-lok or any other anti-piracy device ?

It all gets cracked anyway.

My own software i-lok broke again the other day with another win 10 update, but this time I had a backup from a month ago. I did not know if this would work or if the i-lok would circumvent it. But thankfully it has restored my i-lok status without using up another activation.

I suspect though if I log into the i-lok server it may well decide to deactivate it.

Anyone have any experience in this regard ?

[Chaotikmind]

So, you're gonna make open source DRM ? that works?
i'm taking some popcorn and watching how you do that.

Obviously it'd be DRM that's closed in so far it's required for security.

You didn't read what I wrote earlier. I think GNU would be idiotic, if it meant "hey devs you ought to not use DRM", because that's not going to happen.

Well, maybe i misread "Like a GNU iLok?" in the OT.

Anyway, by doing a protection mechanism that will be used by a lot of people you're basically creating a single point of weakness for a lots of app, and increasing the attractiveness of cracking that protection.

People who want to spend time protecting their software should really listen to Urs take on the subject,
my 2 cents.

[mystran]

You didn't read what I wrote earlier. I think GNU would be idiotic, if it meant "hey devs you ought to not use DRM", because that's not going to happen.

You really have no idea what the GNU philosophy is about? I'll give you the short version.

The fundamental idea of GNU is to provide the user with the freedom to modify the software they are using and to freely distribute those modifications, as long as this freedom is passed on to the users of their modified versions as well. It is also important to understand that the GNU philosophy is not really about the rights of the "developers" but rather all the actual end users.

"Free software" in the GNU sense is more than just "open source" because "open source" is really just one of the (necessary!) mechanisms that are used to protect the end-users freedom to modify (and distribute those modifications) of the software they use. By the FSF/GNU definition, any piece of software is NOT "free software" even if it happens to be "open source" unless you can actually take the source code and freely modify it (and without losing functionality!) and then pass those modifications on to other people as you see fit, who must then be able to modify it further and so on.

It is interesting to note that GNU-GPL (at least the classic version 2) explicitly says you don't even have to agree to any of the terms to use and/or modify the software; you only need to agree to the terms if you actually choose to distribute your modifications, in which case GNU-GPL is there to make sure that you don't try to place additional restrictions on any of the down-stream users.

It should be fairly obvious to a person of average intelligence to see why this principle of protecting the freedom of the users is directly at odds with the whole concept of DRM, which relies on the "software as a black-box" principle, which is exactly what FSF/GNU is against.

If all this makes you think that FSF are a bunch of religious zealots, then I'm don't necessarily disagree, but idiots? I don't think so.

[Miles1981]

The *last* thing the GNU community would ever do is make DRM software.

Are you sure?

https://github.com/PELock/PELock-Softwa ... ensing-SDK
https://github.com/TimSC/rsa-license-key
https://github.com/Vladimir-Novick/Get-License-Code

That's not GNU... nor FSF.

[soundmodel]

People who want to spend time protecting their software should really listen to Urs take on the subject,
my 2 cents.

Where's that?

[BertKoor]

That's here:
http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/search.ph ... mit=Search

[Benutzername]

So, you're gonna make open source DRM ? that works?
i'm taking some popcorn and watching how you do that.

Basically all encryption algorithms on this planet are open source and they are used for high security functions as TLS, file encryption or things like secure HDMI or smart cards.

These systems are secure because everybody knows how they work and still nobody knows how to crack them. Security by obfuscation has never worked and it will never work. No matter how hard you to try to hide something someone will find it eventually.

So of course it will be possible to create secure DRM systems with open source software and hardware. It's all out there. At the end it boils down to certificate management and that's a well known process.

The problem is the support. In one of my former jobs we had a hardware dongle for our software. It was cheap and it worked ok(-ish). But in the end about 80% of all support cases were related to the copy protection and about how to fix it (no lie). Then it was cracked completely and we switched to a different dongle manufacturer. It was more expensive but the developers also handled all these problems with the end users for us. So it was much cheaper in the end.

That is the main problem. No voluntary community can handle the huge amount of problems that any DRM method will bring to the end user. And there will be problems. A lot of them. Always.

And the worst thing about it: The only persons that are affected by these problems are the developers and the legal users who paid a lot money for the product. In the meantime the users of the cracked version will get a much better product for free.

So you will not find a lot of open source programmers who will support such a thing. The main goal for open source programmers is usually to create open source things for a better world, not making proprietary and closed source software even more restrictive and less accessible. Especially if the closed source developer gets all the money and the open source developer gets all the hate from the users.

Please use a established system like iLok or something similar if you want a huge amount of protection. It costs what it costs and many people (including me) will hate it. But the end user can choose if the product is worth the hassle (it's never for me).

If you don't want to use a well known solution then please use a mild version of DRM like u-he (license code), REAPER (license file) or Renoise (watermark). There are plenty of examples out there of real world implementations.

Trying to create a strong home brew license managing system will definitely fail in the end. It will be cracked instantly if a specialist really wants to crack it and thus the DRM will only annoy your legal user base and not the criminals.

[Squidsneeze]

What people tend to forget (or just don't know) is that the copy protection scheme is just one detail, which in the end boils down to just a "valid" or "invalid" flag in the plugin (sure some schemes additionally wrap the binary to do checks before even loading plugin).

The more important thing is the developers integration into their plugins: How will cp affect loading the plugin? How often will it be checked? What exactly will be checked? How many ways of checking are there? When will it be checked? What happens if it isn't valid? What happens if it is valid? How (if any) is blacklisting done? Can we trick a cracker from one release to another? ...

I personally know of devs using secure cp schemes like dongles but failed to integrate it properly (due to laziness or plain lack of knowledge) and got cracked. The customers have seen this as "bad cp, will never buy a plugin using it again", but the cp was great - the dev failed by only setting a true or false flag...