Re:Emacs is special regarding UIs
by chipotle_coyote on Friday September 11, 2020 @07:56PM
(#24448597)
> I haven't used Apple's App Store; is it really true that, say, Ford Motor Company can buy one $9.99 (or $99.99) copy of some useful application and use it on all of the corporate Macs?
No. :) I tried to be clear that I was thinking about individual licenses rather than site licenses, but might not have been, and you're absolutely right about corporate site licenses. Apple's App Store is designed for handling individual licenses -- they're tied to Apple accounts, not machines. (With the asterisk that this isn't necessarily true for iOS devices which can be managed by your company, and there's a whole different way of managing those, but companies I've worked for haven't used those.)
I'm not sure I knew Microsoft was still requiring license keys like that for Windows, but I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.
Individual use (there's a funny story here) doesn't really matter; what matters is groups, corporations, with tens to tens of thousands of users, and yes, Autodesk is an example (and GitLab (https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/), sort of). Things that make X necessary and useful are typically, something that you absolutely need, that requires custom support and big hardware, but not something that everyone on your staff needs all the time.
Funny story: At one point, a security researcher realized you could run a program through an instruction-level compiler, reordering operations without changing behavior, so that the machine running the program would broadcast RF signals containing the program's license number. It wouldn't really do anything for single machines because the signal was too weak, but if everyone at a company were using the same license for program X, you could drive around the neighborhood with a van and pick that fact up clearly.
Microsoft was completely uninterested. If it would not prevent every individual from pirating even one copy, they didn't care. Which may be why I recently typed in a twenty-odd character string into my new gaming machine.