Software Activation: It Stinks
I decided to purchase (a license for)
Maple; partly because I'd like to have it, partly because I need it for an assignment I'm working on. I purchased it directly from Maplesoft. They offer downloadable purchases, which are cheaper, so I decided to go with that. Maple requires activation to be able to use it, but Maple kept giving me an error, until this evening, every time I tried to activate it. It is aggravating to purchase a license to use some software, and then you're not allowed to use it for about a day because of some activation glitch. If companies keep doing things like this to fight "piracy," it will make free (as in free speech) software look more promising despite the fact that free software (in the case of computer algebra systems at least) tend to be less featured.
Software activation doesn't work. More than likely, if I wanted to, I can find a cracked version of Maple on the Internet. Heck, while telling another math student at school about this problem, she offered me a "pirated" Windows copy of Maple (I own a Mac, so it wasn't much help). What does software activation prevent? It prevents honest users like me who, instead of downloading it off some peer-to-peer network, actually purchased a license for using the software. Sometimes honesty is the hard road.
