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Comment by Daishiman | Hacker News Reader

No it isn't. I would pay twice as much as I did for PyCharm, but I want software that I can control which doesn't phone home to the mothership to see if I have the privilege of being able to use it for that month.

I don't want to open the travel laptop I keep stored for when I'm away from home in an airplane or the middle of nowhere and be interrupted because I can't contact a licensing server or whatever such bullshit.

If they want to raise prices, that's fine. But renting tools that are not hosted on the web, for myself and lot of other people, is just a big no-no.

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You're complaining about bugs you haven't encountered yet. If the software simply defaulted to working when it couldn't contact a licensing server, would that resolve things?

That would be a pretty weak DRM implementation, and unlikely to be used in the real world.

(Or... How many people pay for WinRAR?)

Licensing servers are not DRM.

Having the tool ping a server every week doesn't make the tool any harder to crack, and cracked versions obviously don't ping the server, so there's no reason whatever to be draconian about what happens when the check doesn't go through.

At least that's the approach they took at Adobe. IIRC the tool worked normally for up to a month without pinging the server, and after that showed warnings but kept working for a while. The times may have changed but idea was to err as far as possible on the side of lenience, because anyone using a version that pings the server is by definition a paying customer and not a pirate.

I take your point regarding phoning home. I also think that's a problem.

But really, you can't blame software providers. In the old days they'd all do the one-off purchasing model, and then they would all starve to death because people don't want to pay for software. So it's no wonder they're going for a model which is actually proven to work, which is a subscription.

Why not? I have paid consistenly for yearly upgrades, and I'm sure a lot of people can too.

I want shit that works, unconditionally. If JetBrains can't give me that, I'll start looking elsewhere.

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