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Intuit Drops DRM from Future Products

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the step-in-the-right-direction dept.

MisterKoffee writes "ExtremeTech has a story about Intuit dropping Product Activation and Digital Rights Management for most of its future products, including TurboTax, in response to a customer backlash."

2 of 313 comments (clear)

  1. does software DRM _cut_ sales? by wfmcwalter · · Score: 5, Interesting
    My job requires me to develop for QNX using their "momentics professional" kit, hosted on windows. QNX chose to protect this with FlexLM, which is in turn protected by some of the Macrovision stuff that Intuit use.

    While the QNX stuff is generally of excellent quality the FlexLM thing is a persistent source of problems. Installation and upgrade have never gone smoothly, with obscure services not starting or being misconfigured by the installer, client authentication going wrong more times than it should (i.e. ever), and occasional file-locking problems that require a reboot. At least in my case, licence management seems to generate as much traffic with the QNX support folks as does their actual product (host and target) in its entirety.

    Worryingly, the licence is bound specifically to one licence server. I _imagine_ that if the machine (a laptop) were destroyed, lost, or updated, then there would be some means whereby I could persuade them to issue another licence, but it's bound to be a sticky point.

    I wouldn't care if everything worked properly and transparently, but it doesn't. My vendor is essentially treating me like a thief and simultaneously making himself look like a bozo (which he isn't - the rest of the QNX stuff is great).

    On the last occasion it took several days to resolve the licence manager issues - had this been at a more critical time then this would have been a dealbreaker. It leaves me with a rather bitter taste in my mouth, and I'd think twice before recommending QNX to another client, purely for this reason.

    So is their bizantine DRM saving them money, or costing them? I think Intuit can answer that for them.

    --
    ## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
  2. Fool me once, by BigChigger · · Score: 5, Interesting

    shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

    They lost me as a customer. Taxcut did just as well for me and I have no reason to go back to TT from Intuit.

    BC