[General Topics] Chainfire:
First off, thanks for your comments. If I misunderstood you, then my apologies - I have been getting a lot of bashing of people who truely obviously are not understanding the premise.

(first post)

I agree with your point on price-points, general usefulness, etc, and I am glad that for once somebody seems to understand that seemingly simple/complex does not equal actually simple/complex (and vice versa) :)

And you know what, I do think WM apps prices can and should go down - and they will, the more people have easy access to get the cheap apps, the more will be sold, so the cheaper they can be (barring specific business or niche apps). This is a process that will start now and will slowly build up, I guess. Microsoft also needs to change some things to be able to do that though - like adopting Apple's pricing model for app submission, removing regional requirements, etc (I believe all of those thing will happen in 6-12 months, though). They do encourage developers to not make apps $0.99, though. HTC is also killer with integrating everything possible themselves, but enough about that.

As for the whole licensing being tough issue - I agree, and my company is also guilty of this, even though we try to make it easier, I admit partial failure. But this is one of those chances where we can rectify the complete issue from A-Z, so by all means, let's get **** together and do!

It's a car analogy, I'm suprised you even tried to make it fit in the comparison, haha.

The points is that there are many different types of key, many different types of locks. One picklock does not work on all locks. One master key does not work on all locks. Because car manufacturers aren't born yesterday. An executive Mercedes has much better locks than a Ford Explorer. You can't just have a Mercedes key copied in the shoeshop. In Marketplace, however, everybody gets the cheapest lock and easiest copyable key. Smashing a piece of plastic into the hole will open the door for you.

As I said, the analogy fails. It is not that important anyways.

(second post)

I agree with your multiple licensing thing (for consumers). I think a fair share of mobile developers doesn't care how many phones you install it on as long as you own them all. By the way, Marketplace enforces 5, if I recall correctly. In legal speak, even in some of my own softwares a 2 copy (simultaneous) is enforced (soon to be 5). But one thing that should be taken into account is a legal loophole where corporate use can actually be counted as personal use (at least over here) in some occasions. If it's actual "unloopholed" personal use, and you really own 20 phones, it's fine by me if you just get one license code and use it on all of them. It's interesting to think as well that if you are actually married in several countries the legal distinction cannot be made between your phone and your wife's phone either. I actually think (hope) that most developers feel this way. In either case, our customer support has never turned anyone down for a reason like this is your 11th phone... :)

Now, even if you give your license key to your best friend, though this is also unwanted behaviour, I doubt this is in any way as harmful to your bottom line as massive serial number leakage and patched copies appear on warez sites - unless everybody does it, of course.

I do agree with "you buy it, it's yours to use as you like", with the restriction that you don't give it away to other people, more or less.

In an ideal situation, (2) should indeed trump (1). Sadly, right now, this is not often the case. In the current marketplace situation, (1) is pretty much non-existent.

I do believe however, that for the developers that want to put some effort in to do this (as opposed to small apps that can go without this), we can fix the current situation (relatively easily) so that:

(1) There will be no hassle for users switching devices or flashing a new ROM, aside from perhaps having to sign into Marketplace once on this new device, keeping 'automatic updates' and such in place.

(2) Reasonable copy protection which offers developers the means to keep track of installed copies and keys, so mass-abuse (think public leakage/warez) can be prevented or blacklisted.

(3) Allows developers to know who their customers are (demographics are important to anyone who sells anything)

(4) Shift responsibility of the DRM (who choose to do so) to the developers - if you get cracked, at least it's your fault, and you can fix the issue in the next update.

(5) Allow current customers to _easily_ migrate to the Marketplace variant of your software, and the benefits this offers the user (no-nonsense device migration and application updates).

Barring occasional issues, I believe all of those things are possible, in one Marketplace - and Microsoft has the means to make this happen.

No, you cannot make the perfect copy protection, but you can make it a hell of a lot better and keep 'the ultimate user experience'. It can even have benefits for existing (non-Marketplace-bought) users in the form of easy to-Marketplace migration (easy for both user and developer)

This can be done, and for the largest part I've worked out how as well. Win-for-all situation. Now that we can, why would we accept anything less?

As I stated on one of the news sites, it is actually not the deployment of the license that is a problem - it's the generation and verification of it.

I am contemplating writing a white paper about it, but it will take a lot of time and I'm not sure it'll have any effect, unfortunately.

---

On a sidenote, I do believe people could give me some slack, as I do release 90% of the things I do completely for free on xda, geeks, and modaco ;)