SilkTone


Sad. I just downloaded a few of their plugins just last week...

I think if a company like this goes out of business they should just release all their plugins for free (and remove the protection). It is not as if they are going to lose any money doing that, but it will at least give those that paid for their products a chance not be left out in the cold with plugins that can no longer be authorized.

In effect you are correct, they may not lose any money. But businesses have a life of their own, and it is not unusual to find that what is left of a company's assets at the conclusion of business is still owned by someone (company creditors, owners estates etc.) who has no real idea of how to carry on but no authority to give anything away.

The dark side of the licensed-not-owned business model is that it is usually not clear what if any recourse the licensee has when the licensor is gone. Nowhere in your Cakewalk license will you find any guarantee of ongoing support or service if Cakewalk goes belly-up. At least you could still run their software. With some of the digital rights management systems that require constant re-authorization, the software will cease to function or will die with the machine it was last installed on.

...the software will cease to function or will die with the machine it was last installed on.

And that's not a hypothetical scenario, either. It has happened to me. Twice. When it did, I had no choice but to circumvent their authorization scheme in order to upgrade my computer. That experience really soured me on the whole premise of copy protection.

slartabartfast


... But businesses have a life of their own, and it is not unusual to find that what is left of a company's assets at the conclusion of business is still owned by someone (company creditors, owners estates etc.) who has no real idea of how to carry on but no authority to give anything away.

Exactly. The business, while it may (or may not) be "out of business" from our point of view, still exists as an entity with assets, and those assets (i.e.: intellectual property, code, artwork, marketing materials, website files, even things like mailing lists, etc.) have some sort of value. If the Kjaerhus developers are indeed no longer going to continue forward, then whoever owns the assets at least has the *potential* to sell those assets to some other company/individual. Alternatively, they also have the right to release it however else they want, including as open source software, etc....

One can hope that whoever actually owns the assets will at least make some deal so that those plugins can live on in some form, rather than just disappear off the face of the earth like that. Perhaps a company like Cakewalk is already in negotiation? But maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves. Has there even been a confirmation of what happened? Has the owner said something? I have googled, but haven't seen any official word... maybe I missed it. Maybe the owner is just really ill and just inadvertently let the domain name expire? There could be extenuating circumstances that we have no idea about. Anyway, no matter how you look at it, it's unfortunate for all involved.

Ionian

bitflipper

And that's not a hypothetical scenario, either. It has happened to me. Twice. When it did, I had no choice but to circumvent their authorization scheme in order to upgrade my computer. That experience really soured me on the whole premise of copy protection. 

I know the feeling.  I'm an original Gigasampler 96 owner.  I have a machine running Win98 specifically to keep it going.  I've tried bringing it to XP but it crashes like heck so I just keep it running on it's own Win98 machine.  

Tascam no longer maintains Giga, right?  I know my Gigasampler 96 authorizes over the internet.  I'm sure it's incapable of getting authorization anymore.  If something happens to my lowly Win98 machine, even if I build another little one chances are I can't get Giga authorized again.

Argh... it's always the ones who pay who end up paying in the end!

Frank

Garritan bought Giga off Tascam recently:

http://www.gigastudio.com/release.html

eratu


It also makes me think twice about Cakewalk's approach to licensing third-party plugins without some deeper, longer-term relationship with the developers, and some sort of protection from this type of event -- 

...  and I believe with Sonitus, Cakewalk actually has the source code in-house, if I'm not mistaken. However, with VC64 I get the impression it was a reskinned license only, which means we may be out of luck.

I got the feeling with the newer -64 plugs (LP series, PX and VX) that Cake was moving to an all in-house plug-in development plan.  VC-64 and TL-64 may have been the last outsourced parts of Sonar along with Perfect Space.  Pretty sure Cakewalk bought Sonitus and owns the code fully now.

I remember way back at a Sonar 2 demo someone asked why Sonar didn't natively support VST and had to use the FXpansion wrapper.  The rep said the thinking at Cakewalk was why reinvent the wheel when we can just license the technology.  I imagine there is a long term plan to slowly phase out the licensing of other company's products.  I can see the pros and cons of both though.

Unfortunately, I just discovered a thread dating back to January 25th of this year on the KVR Audio forums...The following information was all I could get out of reading several of the 21 pages of the thread:

1) A user sent email to Kjaerhus regarding not being able to license/authorize a KA product he'd recently purchased;

2) He received a response from Torben Kjaerhus Larsen (company founder & software developer) that basically said the following:

Sorry but the license server is down. It was owned by KeyToSound and closed. we are working on a solution.

Late reply due to silly restrictions sending mails from new ISP.

3) The user asked about a time frame estimate when he might be able to license/authorize his purchase.

4) Torben responded: "I honestly do not know. No resources left in company for anything atm."


All of this was happening way back in January. Sadly, the truth may never be known...

check out this link

http://www.brothersoft.co...er/kjaerhus-audio.html

Cliff


edit - oops this is broken too, shame 
:-(

MarlboroMan23

I got the feeling with the newer -64 plugs (LP series, PX and VX) that Cake was moving to an all in-house plug-in development plan. 

Looks that way, and I hope it continues that direction. Seems to coincide with the investment/acquisition by Roland, and if so, makes sense. There are a lot of talented people at Roland, and I hope Cakewalk and Roland are working closely together to leverage their resources... other than just tweaking and rebranding the Edirol product line. ;)

SF_Green


Garritan bought Giga off Tascam recently:

http://www.gigastudio.com/release.html

Wow, totally missed that one. Thanks for the heads up.

I remember reading many years ago of a company that made a "promise" that if they ever went out of business, they would either make their source code freely available, or disable their copy protection (forgot which). I also don't remember which company this was. Not even sure whether this software was music-related or not.

The point is that there are at least some companies that try and put their users at ease that they won't be left out in the cold when the business shuts down.

As to papa's comment about the KVR thread dating back to January... What I don't understand is how can any company that is either out of business, or at the brink of going out of business, still sell licenses when they know those users might never even be able to authorize their software. I mean, it is not as if them going out of business was something that happened overnight.