I was just thinking, how ill informed I am, in oh so many areas. For example how would becoming more of an anthropologist, fit in with the accommodating/obliging facet of Keith`s nature, as evidenced within the,‘Wish List/Feedback’, forums.
Take care
vic
Oh, I’m studying you all… This is all part of one great big experiment. Buhahah. Etc.
vee are votching yoo too comrade!!
Yet another personality rears its head. I begin to wonder what vic-k was like when he was just vic-k.
You`ll probably have to ask my parole officer.
To come back on topic, someone up thread asked if I had any way of knowing if activation worked. As I said earlier, no personal information is sent through the activation process - only your serial number. But from that I can see that we have had just under 1,000 attempts at activating a known pirated serial number. Some of those are repeated attempts, so maybe the real number is half that, but even so, that’s 500 people who use Scrivener enough to have updated it in the first few days who haven’t paid for a copy. We’re not a big company - that is a lot of users for us (and that would pay a good chunk of David’s salary 
).
Hi Keith,
As a small time software developer myself I completely understand where you are coming from in terms of using activation and trying to minimize piracy as much as possible. I also certainly think that eSellerate do wonders for the software publishing community and have no philosophical problem with them.
The main problem I have is that I just didn’t know! From memory when I saw there was an update I didn’t see a message letting me know that activation was going to be required in future versions. I think your stance on it is also very good (in terms of making activation very ‘light’). As someone who has both a desktop and an old laptop which I clunk from class to class there is nothing more frustrating than having license limits!
I would’ve like to have seen a big pulsating message in the update window that I just couldn’t have ignored letting me know about this. Then I would have been able to make a decision as your customer between keeping with my old version and (if I had any objections, which I don’t FYI) keeping my ‘moral high ground’ or just swallowing it as a fact of life.
In other words, keep on making us great software! We all appreciate your hard work and I always look forward to seeing those little ‘there is an update available’ messages. However, pretty much just because you asked I think that it would have been useful to have been a little more informed about the change.
Cheers and kindest regards,
Tom
(ps, where do I sign up for your newsletter?)
The interesting result will be to see if you see an increase in purchases from this. I have this feeling that anyone who uses pirated software never would pay for it in the first place, so pirated copies in use do not necessarily translate into lost revenue. Nevertheless, it disgusts me that people would even consider NOT paying for a quality application like Scrivener (especially when it is so reasonably priced), so if you can thwart them, or at least make it a little bit harder, go for it.
Me too. I can’t for the life of me remember actually being asked to activate 1.52. Weird.
Keith’s already said he’s had pirates sheepishly buy from him. I agree with the “not necessarily” part of what you said, but that directly contradicts with your “anyone” above, which is contradicted by Keith’s experience.
blinks wonders if she’s making any sense whatsoever
Compared to the +3? Alway. Compared to past posts? I understood you, which means probably not.
My own experience of the activation was PAINLESS … I saw it coming in the change-log and on this forum, … I completely get Keith’s reasons for it … and support it 100%.
Ok so this is going to sound like I’m a fan-boy but jeez, L&L already offer a generous (say it with me: GENEROUS) household licence, the developer is hands-down the most responsive I’ve ever dealt with in 20 years on a mac and well, Scriv just compares so well in the value-for-money stakes it makes my eyes water.
That, by the sounds of it, hundreds of people are running a pirated serial number borders on obscene, in this instance, no matter how I look at it. - Peter
So there I was…
I downloaded the update last night. The download was slow, but my dsl stinks on ice so I thought nothing of it. Then, as the update was installing, my connection failed outright.
It took about three minutes for Scrivener to decide it wasn’t going to hear back from esellrate. That was the longest three minutes of my life so far… 
I had to reboot my dsl modem after I got over the initial anger, fear, resentment, bargaining, et cetera. So yeah, Scrivener had bloody well better work without an internet connection. 
P.S. I will upgrade to 2.0 just as soon as I can afford it after release. Can’t function without Scrivener anymore.
Hi Peter,
Thank you. I’m glad not everyone sees me as an argumentative monster!
Thanks for the kind words and for your support,
All the best,
Keith
I dont really mind, as an honest customer, as long as the software doesnt treat me as a pirate. Like for example EA who really start things like “Oh, no internet connection, no game” and all that crap.
The thing is, you cant REALLY prevent it. There will always be serials roaming the net, there will be always some hacks. In the end, you invest time and money into anti-piracy measures that could have gone into development to reward the real customers.
Many companies believe that if they would achieve an unbreakable system for their software, their profits would rise 100 % or something. This is plain silly, because people copy stuff BECAUSE they can get it for free - not because they want or need it.
Would you pay for a game that has manipulated/paid reviews all over the place (especially the first reviews to come out, hello Eidos/Cnet/Kane&Lynch…) or rather try it for free? Well, of course people get things for free if they can. But if they cant, they wont pay for it either, so they prefer not to have it - because they didnt desperately need it.
Photoshop is a great example - I think it is very popular… but why is it so popular? Not because of the price, as far as I can tell. Do people want it? Of course, because it can do pretty much everything. Do they need it? Hell no, a 30€ shareware could probably perform all things they could ever do with Photoshop anyway, maybe even some freeware.
Scrivener falls into a different category with its price. Pretty much everyone who needs it can afford it. This, I believe, causes a much better ratio between people who buy it vs. people who copy and actually need it.
I believe that whoever needs Scrivener for serious writing will pay for it sooner or later. Draconian DRM is only getting on the honest customers nerves…
To conclude (rather lengthy here, I had not expected that!) I think that product activation is “okay” so far, but dont jump on the heavy DRM train… there is nothing to gain. However, if you roll out 2.0 sometime, you will gain my upgrade payment
I’m perfectly fine with product activations, as long as they don’t go the way of EA Games, like Spore or Crysis Warhead, which imposes a limited number of activations (and not only that, those activations could be triggered by something as mundane as installing a new video card). That’s just plain mean, and I think such extreme DRM plans encourage more piracy than they prevent. Scrivener’s was simple—quick, painless, easy, and non-restrictive to the legal paying customer.
Yes, Keith, our earlier conversation was perfectly distracting from my looming deadline.* Things even got dramatic there for a while–If everyone had kept that up, I might have kept rubbernecking and jumped my deadline altogether! Sorry if another poster mistook our exchange for something other than it was.
As an addendum, I’ll just add that I do not actually advocate or promote the feelings/attitudes that I reported about activation/eSellerate. I just recognize that I have them. But, of course, since they are based on little or partial understanding of these things, they are also educable attitudes–as for example by your several explanatory posts on the question.
Best,
Greg
- Though nothing could distract me from several days of glorying in having met it.
I’m somewhat uncomfortable with product activation, but I think the way you guys are currently doing it is a pretty good example of how to handle things. Not too onerous.
My discomfort about activation comes in two flavors: First, with any software I want absolute certainty that I can later retrieve my data under any circumstances. It appears that your “defaults to acceptance upon loss of the net” covers that. (Not too long ago I set about recovering all my ancient data from myriad OS 9 discs, so I found myself installing antediluvian software on an old machine just long enough to access my files and pull my data out. If those apps from dead companies had required activation, I’d have been SOL. So this is a biggie for me)
Second, and I admit this is utterly subjective, my first impressions of product activation was of being amused at the plight of the poor Windows XP users who had to deal with it, which cemented it in my mind as a typically Microsoftian way to handle things. Less a problem of being inconvenient, as being insulting, assuming I’m scum until I can prove otherwise. Then when Adobe threw activation into Photoshop and I had to deal with it first hand, my previously warm feelings for Adobe cooled precipitously. While Photoshop used to simply be “the best tool for the job,” now it’s “the best tool for the job, but I’d like to jump ship if something as good comes along.”
So for me the use of product activation is a definite factor in purchasing software. For two products that are otherwise identical, having product activation on one will usually lean me strongly toward the other. This then comes up again each time there’s a paid upgrade – I haven’t upgraded to Adobe CS4 for this very reason.
That said, your current implementation is pretty reasonable, and since I already have my new Scrivener license so I’m hardly going to jump ship anytime soon, but the warm fuzzies are just a little weaker than they could be. Being a Mac user, warm fuzzies are important!
Better than activation I think that ‘watermarking’ binary before sell them can be more useful than activation, if a binary is founded in the wild you can easily read ‘name & info’ of the buyer and revoke his/her license.
This approach seem better than serial & serial activation, as example take the IDA pro disassembler: they watermark bins when they are sold with customer info, doing this is harder pirating scrivener because the only way to pirate it is to spread your binary into the wild, when this is done L&T has to find this bin in the wild read customer info and ‘ban it’, L&T could also start a legal action against it.
IDA Pro cracked version is stopped to 2 maior release ago, so it works. Either with Snow Leopard Apple bin are signed against modification and they are checked upon starts, could third party dev also sign theirs bins? if you this could be a plus against watermark removing.
Could this post be usefull?
I think that with watermarked bins a customers thinks twice before release his/her personal copy for self-safe or similar.
my 2 cents.