Path: csiph.com!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: John-Paul Stewart Newsgroups: comp.lang.javascript Subject: Re: Does "cloud" mean the end of piracy? Date: Sat, 20 Jul 2019 22:17:51 -0400 Lines: 47 Message-ID: References: <14271795-8526-4153-a665-e0c7b5626857@googlegroups.com> <9d15bc61-47ce-45a3-96cf-fe386e3dc6c9@googlegroups.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net SUWBq7UwdQ7UlpaA0HMhlQAtH3fLBSj8vRheWCU4wgvng6kunt Cancel-Lock: sha1:6rlrMO/fOzINKa2EMvy7Vz4JdXc= X-Mozilla-News-Host: news://news.individual.net User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/60.8.0 In-Reply-To: <9d15bc61-47ce-45a3-96cf-fe386e3dc6c9@googlegroups.com> Content-Language: en-CA Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.javascript:36968 On 2019-07-20 3:39 a.m., groovee@cyberdude.com wrote: > > I'm asking - is it possible that someone can download a copy of the > software and use it without paying?? It is impossible to answer that in the general case. There are many factors that come into play. It all depends on how the software was written. With desktop software, some applications run once they're installed and others require a license key. Whether or not a license key is needed is a design decision those authors made, not an inherent property of desktop software. It is similar with cloud software. How it runs and what authorization is needed is largely a design decision for the implementors of that software, not an inherent property of the nature of cloud software. Also note that "cloud" does not always mean "JavaScript" or "running in the browser". (Which was what Evertjan was alluding to when he -- quite correctly -- pointed out that this discussion is off-topic in this newsgroup.) At https://products.office.com/en-ca/explore-office-for-home you can see that Microsoft's "Office 365" "cloud" offering gives you software that is "Fully installed on your PC or Mac, no Internet access needed to create or edit documents." In that case, "the cloud" is used to distribute the software, share documents, presumably periodically verify that your subscription is paid up, etc. It is most certainly not trying to run Word or Excel in your browser. By contrast, I believe Google's cloud-based word processor and spreadsheet do run in your browser. Those two companies made very different design decisions when implementing their cloud-based software. So you can see that your question about piracy requires different answers (which in turn depend on different factors) for each piece of cloud-based software. Many companies are using the cloud to verify software licenses in an effort to reduce or eliminate piracy (whether or not the application is running in the browser). That's because they've chosen to use the cloud to do so, not because there is any inherent property of the cloud that prevents piracy. It is also important to remember that "the cloud" is not necessarily well-defined. Almost everything Internet-related gets labelled as being in "the cloud" these days. It is currently a popular marketing buzzword that means different things to different people and different companies. Some of those companies just use the phrase "the cloud" to sound trendy and up-to-date.