> UE admitted that SDS/2 had been used to create files and drawings in five of its projects, but argued that they were made by contractors in China.
China piracy story time. I was talking to makers of a niche CAD type software package. It was niche enough that they simply knew all their customers pretty much by name. They went to a trade show to exhibit their software, and a group of Chinese engineers approached them, thanked them and told how much the love their software, it is the best really for what it does, etc, etc. So that was good, everyone was happy and smiling, except one thing - the company shown on their badges was not a client.
Well they had a problem. Their software was being pirated. There was talk of a selling a hardware dongle with it. But I am not sure what came of it, since I lost contact with them.
Here is what I wonder. Even if they lowered the price just for China, would there be a point where they would choose to pay for it or it would never matter a pirated copy would always be preferred.
I have done a few HW and a few SW startups. For the HW I would eventually help us move into all of Asia. For the SW I would help move into Asia, minus China.
At our company we did eventually end up with a hardware dongle. But it helped that it was a HW/SW solution anyway. We just added a few operations that needed to go through a hardware module. It was just enough hoops to jump through to hopefully dissuade the casual "pirate".
It was an interesting problem anyway. A lot of obvious solutions didn't seem to work, like say just checking a flag in an "if ... else" branch because that can be disassembled and bypassed with a patch. Some functional operations that are critical to the product had to actually go through the hardware... Now looking back we probably over-engineered the heck out of it.
Does it include future updates? Are they pushed out to clients automatically? Does it include product support? Is it at least as easy to use as the pirated version (i.e. no intrusive DRM)? Is it at least as easy to obtain?
If you can provide a service that can't easily be copied for less, generally people will pay for it.
China piracy story time. I was talking to makers of a niche CAD type software package. It was niche enough that they simply knew all their customers pretty much by name. They went to a trade show to exhibit their software, and a group of Chinese engineers approached them, thanked them and told how much the love their software, it is the best really for what it does, etc, etc. So that was good, everyone was happy and smiling, except one thing - the company shown on their badges was not a client.