Dongles or license servers make some economic sense for highly specialized software products that cost a lot to develop and have a fairly limited market. This means a market where the sweep-in benefits of allowing casual unpaid use are minimal, the need for costly user support is high, and where there would be significant incentive for licensed sites to stretch the number of users beyond the purchased amount. The most dramatic example would be silicon design tools, where a full suite can cost > $100K per seat. Personally I like sourceware, but the biz models of Cadence and Synopsis won't work on the low cost / wide access scheme.
I can live without an IDE (long live Gnu make!) but it's very hard to get any significant code ported--even on a trial basis--without a debugger. And Borland reps have said on their newsgroup forums.inprise.com/borland.public.cppbuilder.comma ndlinetools that a debugger is NOT forthcoming and that the best way to obtain one is "buy Borland C++ Builder".
Now it would be brilliant if somebody could hack gdb around to grok the BCC symbols.
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Dongles or license servers make some economic sense for highly specialized software products that cost a lot to develop and have a fairly limited market. This means a market where the sweep-in benefits of allowing casual unpaid use are minimal, the need for costly user support is high, and where there would be significant incentive for licensed sites to stretch the number of users beyond the purchased amount. The most dramatic example would be silicon design tools, where a full suite can cost > $100K per seat. Personally I like sourceware, but the biz models of Cadence and Synopsis won't work on the low cost / wide access scheme.
-caveduck
illegitimis non carborundum
I can live without an IDE (long live Gnu make!) but it's very hard to get any significant code ported--even on a trial basis--without a debugger. And Borland reps have said on their newsgroup forums.inprise.com/borland.public.cppbuilder.comma ndlinetools that a debugger is NOT forthcoming and that the best way to obtain one is "buy Borland C++ Builder".
Now it would be brilliant if somebody could hack gdb around to grok the BCC symbols.