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Comment by PeterisP | Hacker News Reader

Hah, it reminds me of a shareware program that had two options for registration, one required you to pay some dollars to get a registration code, and the other, labeled as licence for CIS countries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_of_Independent_St...) simply required you to enter the name of the current day of week in Russian cyrillic alphabet.

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I believe it's not related. When the shareware model was popular, a lot of the programs made by developers from exUSSR republics were either free or sold at the significantly lowered price to native speakers, so such tests were common. (I've seen Russian folk riddles as tests, for example). The developers were doing this because they were keenly aware of the economic situation in their home countries, and because the software would have been pirated anyway. So there was less incentive for russian speakers to crack it as it was free for them. It was a completely different time as well, nobody was thinking about legal action.

> I believe it's not related.

Not related to what? Law enforcement risks are probably not related. Discouraging piracy outside of Russia, more likely related.

Not sure why this is downvoted. An exUSSR license was very common in shareware whose authors were themselves from the region. WinRAR and FAR are examples, but there are certainly more.

Maybe because it claims "they are unrelated" and then spends some time describing the relation? That is, between cracking shareware and its language filter to avoid said cracking.

And I think what the comment meant was: the special license was driven more by consideration of the fellow countryman's economic situation than by appeasement of crackers. In reality it was probably a bit of both.

I believe I saw it in the FAR file manager.

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