To think I used to tell a story about how in college I went to there were 2 primary cad packages being used, One was I think CadKey? The other was Autocad (10ish through 12ish for dos). Cadkey required a hardware dongle to run, autocad required a serial number and the floppies were normal and copied fine.
"Why don't they copy protect that? what are they stupid?"
Everyone in the world (seemingly) had a pirate copy of acad at home for free, and got real good at it, and every small shop that does any sort of drawing even art stuff like sign makers let alone landscapers, architects, urban planers, etc, alllll ended up buying tons of legit licenses because everyone they wanted to hire plus their own selves, all know acad, and no one's even heard of cadkey or whatever that other one was.
I used to tell that story as an example of enlightened self interest, deliberately enabling piracy being not only nicer but also making you far richer than fanatically trying to detect and prosecute every tiny instance of "zomg theft!".
Either Autodesk was never actually that intentionally nice company I thought they were, or it changed.
I have read a few articles from early employees and I think what it really was originally was schizophrenic. It had people with different attitudes at the same time so the company did both good and bad things at the same time, until the douchebags won as they always do and drove the nice guys out.
"Why don't they copy protect that? what are they stupid?"
Everyone in the world (seemingly) had a pirate copy of acad at home for free, and got real good at it, and every small shop that does any sort of drawing even art stuff like sign makers let alone landscapers, architects, urban planers, etc, alllll ended up buying tons of legit licenses because everyone they wanted to hire plus their own selves, all know acad, and no one's even heard of cadkey or whatever that other one was.
I used to tell that story as an example of enlightened self interest, deliberately enabling piracy being not only nicer but also making you far richer than fanatically trying to detect and prosecute every tiny instance of "zomg theft!".
Either Autodesk was never actually that intentionally nice company I thought they were, or it changed.
I have read a few articles from early employees and I think what it really was originally was schizophrenic. It had people with different attitudes at the same time so the company did both good and bad things at the same time, until the douchebags won as they always do and drove the nice guys out.