| Home | Amateur radio | Contact me | Digital freedom | Wildlife | Writings | Copyright © Michael Kjörling |
Recently, commercial software vendors have been spreading the practice of
product activation
. It has been common for shareware products for
decades to require registration in order to be fully usable, but now, instead
of only requiring that you register once (often after a relatively short trial
period; 30 days has been common) and enter a unique registration code which
you can then reuse over and over again, on the same or different computers,
the registration is tied to a particular computer hardware configuration and
must be verified or even provided by the software vendor – and if
that was not enough, it is often validated from time to time to make sure that
your license is still "valid". This places an imminent and serious
threat to our ability to use our computers and data, not just today, but also
in the future.
Imagine, for example, that you purchase a copy of Microsoft Office. During the installation, you are asked to register with Microsoft, which you do, and receive an activation code which you enter into your copy of the program. You use it for a few years, then decide that it is time to get a faster computer, so you go out and buy a new one. Because you only have one license and wish to stay legal, you uninstall Office from your old computer and pop the CD into the new computer, installing the software. Everything is fine until you are asked to register, but Microsoft will not accept your license number because it has already been activated on a different computer. Since you have a lot of important data that you wish to be able to access, and the Microsoft representative will not authorize the new installation, you give up in despair and reinstall Office on the old computer. Having written down the activation code you received during your first installation, you simply enter those numbers. The installation program verifies this with Microsoft and refuses to continue, because the license is already in use, or maybe the product is no longer even supported by the activation service. It is also possible, especially for software written by a smaller company, that the vendor has gone out of business entirely. You now have what once was a perfectly usable piece of software, that has been reduced to the value of the physical material that makes up the CD and possibly any users' manuals you might have, and are unable to read your own files. If you are lucky, you can go out and buy a license for the most recent version, and it will read your old files. But what if it does not, or if there is no such new version to buy?
The situation is far from specific to Microsoft, and could present a major
problem for any computer user. Especially if there is no other product
available that can read the files you have created, and/or some kind of Digital
Rights Management technology has been used to restrict access to those files,
it is possible, and even likely, that your hard work has been in vain. This is
a part of why software interoperability, and access
to file format specifications, should be a concern to everyone, not just
programmers and other power users
.
Listed in no particular order.