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I can tell you that piracy in the corporate world was RAMPANT in the ‘90s. I made a nice sum of money back in the day as a freelance auditor for companies trying to get their legal ducks in a row. Productivity software like Lotus, WordPerfect, Word, Excel were just mass installed off one license because there was no product activation keys or any sort of license validation methods.

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.

by Plasmoid16 hours ago|

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Even at a simple level, if it's between spending weeks going through purchasing or not asking too many questions and getting on with it. I can see a lot of people choosing option B.

by IshKebab13 hours ago|

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Yeah case in point - how many people actually pay for Visual Studio? You're supposed to if you're using it for commercial purposes but I don't think I've ever seen a commercial license used (though I don't do a lot of Windows work tbf).

by electroly6 hours ago|

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In the late 90s/early 00s, I worked at a company that bought a single license of Visual Studio + MSDN and shared it with every single employee. In those days, MSDN shipped binders full of CDs with every Microsoft product, and we had 56k modems; it was hard to pirate. I don't think that company ever seriously considered buying a license for each person. There was no copy protection so they just went nuts. That MSDN copy of Windows NT Server 4 went on our server, too.

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.

by andyjohnson05 hours ago|

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> In the late 90s/early 00s, I worked at a company that bought a single license of Visual Studio + MSDN and shared it with every single employee.

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.

by samplatt12 hours ago|

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VS is actually one of the cheaper tools in our stack; Unity (the game engine) is probably the most expensive one at the moment, and it's going to get much more so with their recent changes to licensing structure for embedded hardware.

by Joel_Mckay9 hours ago|

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Unity has always had janky shaders, the fact people still use it over Unreal Engine or even Godot is completely baffling.

Unity is getting way too cheeky considering how they started out. =3

by wongarsu7 hours ago|

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For anything smaller than AAA, C# is just generally much more pleasant to work in than C++. That's Unity's edge. And Godot is the "new" kid on the block

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

by numpad06 hours ago|

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Yeah, there is a reason why Adobe, Autodesk, Oracle, IBM, etc., are notorious for weirdly draconian and idiotic-sounding licensing enforcement. Many corporate managers show very little sympathy to the concept of IP laws if they did understand superiority of laws over convenience in the first place.