[AstralWanderer]

Originally Posted by JimMorrison

1) The likelihood of Impulse/Stardock going out of business anytime soon is nil.

Mm, quite a statement to make. Have you access to Stardock's accounts to back this up? If not, I would suggest such confidence to be misplaced. The most successful companies in the games industry can be brought to their knees within six months by poor decision-making, difficult trading conditions or actions taken by others (e.g. Interplay, Looking Glass, Black Isle).

Originally Posted by JimMorrison

Due to Brad's disposition, and his strong stance on these issues, I would not doubt that he would personally see to it that all products purchased prior to dissolution of Stardock, would be allowed to be used in perpetuity.

Company bankruptcies can be sudden and dramatic. Even with a well-intentioned CEO, there is no guarantee that customers would be allowed to continue activating products. It would be up to the creditors/administrators to decide this and it would seem more likely that this service would be cut (in order to save costs) or customers made to pay extra to continue activation. Shamus Young's Authorization Servers article has more discussion on this.

Originally Posted by JimMorrison

But to imply this is a possible scenario with Stardock, is to express lack of understanding of what Brad Wardell and Stardock are trying to accomplish.

I think I understand very well what Brad is seeking to accomplish. He's trying to make "his DRM" seem better than "everyone else's DRM". However if you check the implementation of Stardock's activation (an installation keyfile tied to a specific system) and the changes in terms and conditions they have already made (most notably, the imposition of a re-activation fee if they think that software has been transferred - see point 3 of this post), this should show that the downsides for Stardock's consumers are almost identical.

Originally Posted by JimMorrison

Supporting Stardock/Impulse, actually discourages conventional DRM.

Any system where multiple products are tied to a single account leaves customers open to digital blackmail at a later date (via annual or even monthly fees levied to keep that account active). Whatever Stardock are like now offers no guarantee as to how they will behave in the future. If there is any guarantee it is that companies will act in their own interests and should that involve bringing in a regime of regular payments by hook or by crook, then that will happen.

However, as Impulse sells games with "conventional" DRM, supporting it really isn't likely to make any difference.

Impulse has another specific disadvantage - it requires .NET Framework which not only makes it a slow application but one which adds a great deal of bloat to the Windows Registry (1.2MB - most other software adds 50KB or less) resulting in either reduced performance or greater memory usage, depending on whether that data is cached or not.

Originally Posted by JimMorrison

Personally, I've come to despise physical media. I've seen more disk failures in my life than I care to count, some of them irreplaceable.

The two times I've had CD failures were due to my not having installed no-CD patches (and hence using those CDs excessively). As long as CD/DVDs are kept packaged away and only used to install software, they should last for decades - no download site has this level of surety. The key thing is that software longevity is (almost) totally under the customer's control.

DRM-free software (like Dom3) is certainly the best choice, but media-based DRM involves less risk for the consumer than any online DRM.