| ??? 08/17/09 00:33 Read: times |
#168364 - Tangential Richard at work Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Richard said:
Do you directly or indirectly work for Keil? A rather stupid comment. Richard said:
Now ... Which is "better", KEIL or IAR? What about the others? On what basis do you believe one is "better" than the others? How did you arrive at that conclusion? How many man-hours were dedicated to making that determination? Who paid for those man-hours? Was it Keil, or IAR, or one of their competitors? I did not discuss any "better". I did discuss the likelyhood that customers would prefer zero-cost cracked versions just because they could get their hands on them. If 10 customers would run cracked copies that would still represent significant money. If Keil don't get you as a customer, that is just one single license lost. In the end, most people do manage to decide what compiler to do on their own, without having an unlimited license to play with. A good developer will notice the difference between intentional limitations and unintentional, i.e. limitations that also exists in the full licenses because the product just isn't good enough. Richard said:
If the software is as easy to crack as would be likely with low-cost "cracked" version, the software can't be that good either, since the bulk of their effort goes into protection, rather than product quality. Sorry, but your sentence don't seem to compute. Please rephrase. Building a limited edition don't cost any big money or time. And conditional compilation of the compiler source code can easily lead to practically uncracable binaries. A cracker can't just modify one or more constants in the binary, but must supply own code to duplicate the functionality that wasn't included. Richard said:
I'm not so focused on the money itself, but on how I spend it. If one compiler reaches 90% of my requirements, and the other reaches only 85% but costs $400 instead of $4000, well, I need to know that, and I need to know which 15% of my requirements aren't being met by either of them. Your example begins with one compiler that reaches 90% of your requirements. It then ends by talking about the 15% it doesn't support. Are you sure you are spending enough time thinking about good examples before presenting them? But you are missing the big point. Either IAR or Keil would work well. Both would allow you to mix C and assembler, and the C code would be compiled to reasonaby good assembler. And a very large percentage of most applications are neither size nor speed-critical. I consider the Keil compiler better, so I don't find it too interesting to look at the price of the IAR compiler. Richard said:
Of course, if the evaluation period/capabilities are sufficiently limited, blatant flaws are easily masked. That's what these software houses do, don't you know. They produce crap, dress it up, let the customers find the flaws and, eventually, fix some of them ... maybe ... I am a Keil customer. You are not. That make me think that I'm the one who should use the "don't you know" comment - it is clearly obvious that you do not know the capabilities of the leading 8051 compilers. Richard said:
A calendar-based eval package installable on only one machine would be quite straightforward to generate. It simply has to know the identity of the machine in question, BIOS checksum at installation * date * time, * NIC MAC address * registered evaluee's ID ... you get the picture. You are showing the experience of a CS freshman. The eval package would be very straightforward to generate. And also very straightforward to fool. 1) Use it for 8 hours a day. But stop the clock during the night and weekends. 30 days * 24 hours would then translate to 90 8-hour workdays or 18 40-hour weeks. 2) Take a snapshot of the machine. Reset the clock and restore the snapshot after 30 days for an infinite license. Each restore would only cost a couple of key presses. 3) Install an add-on that remaps the normal time function when called by the compiler. If you always do full rebuilds, you could then completely stop the clock. If not using full rebuilds, you could still stretch the clock speed several orders of magnitude. There are other alternatives too, but to reuse one of your phrases: "you get the picture." And the bad thing here is that you can virtualize machines. It is trivial to modify your MAC address. A single cracked license locked for a VMWare virtual machine would allow interested pirates to retrieve a free copy of the VMWare Player product and then run the cracked copy. And yes - I do believe that a zero-cost full (but craceked) license being spread would represent quite a number of lost sales. |
