Slashdot Mirror
Has Intuit Made Good on DRM Removal?
M-G asks: "It's tax time again in the US. Last year, Slashdot and other sites were abuzz with Intuit's use of activation software in TurboTax. As a result, many long time TurboTax users, myself included, sought alternatives last year and wrote Intuit to tell them so. After tax season, Intuit said they would drop DRM from future TurboTax releases and other products sold in retail packaging. While I have no reason to assume that Intuit lied, they did violate my trust last year. So, has anyone confirmed that this year's TurboTax is indeed free of DRM? What about products like Quicken?"
Maybe TurboTax has cleaned-up, but others have not:
I bought MathCad to assist with my Calculus homework. Much to my dismay, it also uses the same DRM that TurboTax used. There is a service that has to be running for Mathcad to work, and it created a few surrepticiously hidden directories under system32 and the root. I would not have bought the product if I knew it wanted a service running all the time.
For now, I just enable it when I'm working, and disable it otherwise. And to boot (no pun intended), the entire app requires Administrator access too (I can't fathom why.)
What can I do? There is no groundswell of complaints like what happened to Intuit. Do I call the company and complain? I doubt they will give me a refund. I already purchased the product, so I feel like I've unknowingly funded the digital mafia.