This is a nice idea but the reality is that there's MANY corporate customers who are happy to get away with casual piracy. Sometimes it's a holdover from when the company was small enough that every business expense is realistically coming out of their own pocket, sometimes they're trying to obfuscate how much their department actually costs to the company at large.
You think individual consumers lie to themselves to justify software piracy? Corporate self-deception is a WHOLE new kettle of fish.
Dongles were pretty commonplace on your more expensive software products from mid 90s through the early 00s. If I was publishing software that was a >$1000 a license, I damn sure would have used them.
This was true of all software they used, but MSDN was the most expensive and blatant. If it didn't have copy protection, they weren't buying more than one copy.
We were a software company. Our own software shipped with a Sentinel SuperPro protection dongle. I guess they assumed their customers were just as unscrupulous as them. Probably right.
Every employer I've worked for since then has actually purchased the proper licenses. Is it because the industry started using online activation and it wasn't so easy to copy any more? I've got a sneaky feeling.
During roughly the same time period I worked for a company with similar practices. When a director realised what was going on, and the implications for personal liability, I was given the job of physically securing the MSDN CD binder, and tracking installations.
This resulted in everyone hating me, to the extent of my having stand-up, public arguments with people who felt they absolutely needed Visual J++, or whatever. Eventually I told the business that I wasn't prepared to be their gatekeeper anymore. I suspect practices lapsed back to what they'd been before, but its been a while.
Unity is getting way too cheeky considering how they started out. =3
I'd agree that between Unreal and Godot, Unity doesn't look very attractive right now. But inertia will carry them for a long time
Trust the people whose paychecks depend on it, it was extremely common. I knew multiple people at different companies who had endless stories about customers buying a couple of copies for a large department to “share”, and they expected the vendor to support everything because it was “business critical”. This was also a problem for things like student licenses where people would expect enterprise-level support despite the massively-discounted copy they had clearly stating it was only for educational usage.
This has a lot of negative aspects for preservation, downtime due to issues with licensing, challenges around virtualization or hardware replacement, etc. so I don’t love the situation we ended up in but it’s entirely understandable given how pervasive theft was – there were a ton of small businesses which ran entirely on bootlegged software. Software developers have high leverage but if you aren’t in a mainstream market you’re not going to get over the threshold where you’re no longer worried about making payroll.
They often need to "purchase" the license themselves in the sense of convincing someone higher up to buy it - so they're spending their time, which is still a sort of expense.
Also, piracy in companies is often just honest people who are in a bit of a hurry and need this software running on some other PC right now, or just want their colleague to give it a quick go (but then they end up using it all the time). Copy protection helps keep those honest people honest.
The big boys in the industry won't risk problems, and anyway, that's a small price for them. However, the many smaller companies? They may absolutely need the software, but that's a substantial price for them. If they can get a cracked version online, they do.
And the cracked versions? They are made by companies out of legal reach: Russia, Belarus, Pakistan, India. They crack the software, and either put it online for free, or even have the cheek to sell it for a reduced price.
I've told my friend/acquaintance that he really needs to put the software in the cloud, accessible only via browser. However, this would be a massive undertaking, so he hasn't done it (yet).
I always thought that selling B2B. Then I started checking and it was much worse than I expected. Big corporates were mostly fine but small to medium sized business were pretty bad. Also Asia was much worse than Europe and the US.
“Spare the money” is probably what you mean. That is to part with the money, to avoid having it, for example by spending it. Or by giving it away - As in “can you spare a dime.” The is the inverse of sparing the expense, just as an expense is the inverse of money.