Dongles are a device of the devil. They are evil, and they will cause you unnecessary headaches, and often, cause you unnecessary downtime as well. If a vendor insists on using these things, you should not buy that vendor's product. No matter how much you need it and no matter how much you want it, you shouldn't buy it.

Thrice I Offer Proof of Its Evil Nature So what's wrong with dongles? First, they introduce a single point of failure you shouldn't have to live with. If the dongle breaks or falls off your computer, the software stops working--that's not exactly mission-critical performance. Imagine if every piece of software required one of these things: You'd have a dozen or so of them hanging off the end of your computer. And you know that sooner or later, you'll find a couple that interfere with each other.

Second, the goal of the dongle is to limit you to running software on one system, even though there are legitimate reasons to run software on a second set of hardware when you own only one copy of the software, such as if you want to build and test a server as a hot spare or migrate to a larger server and test it before putting it in operation. Either task would be impossible with copy-protection dongles. You certainly shouldn't be forced to purchase a second copy of the software just to create a backup server.

Finally, I object to the assumption that copy protection is needed. If the likes of IBM, Microsoft, Novell and the database companies don't use it, then neither should anyone else. Vendors will talk about protecting their revenue streams and so on. But protecting those streams with an implicit assumption that their customers are thieves shouldn't be an argument that you're willing to accept. Furthermore, it is my hope and belief that vendors should lose more money through lost sales than they make through additional sales to existing customers.

It's not much better for end-user software, where centralized desktop management is often rendered useless in the presence of copy-protected software. And laptop users are equally annoyed at the need to transport dongles. Keyed disks are even worse, because it's not a matter of whether they will wear out, but rather when they will wear out.

Software Is an Ambitious Industry I imagine that when a young company looks at its new product and thinks about the potential for lost sales due to software piracy, the temptation is significant to incorporate copy protection. But most successful products that start out that way drop that scheme after time. The administration of hardware keys and the need to serialize software are expensive and probably not warranted for a growing company.

Now I know it's not often that you encounter copy-protected software. But if you do, first, do not buy the software under any circumstances whatsoever. Second, tell vendors why you aren't buying the product. Tell them that you would have bought if it weren't for the dongle. Sooner or later, they'll get the point, and we can eradicate this blight from our industry. There cannot be any question on this point.

As for me, I'm considering developing an "Editor Refuses to Review the Product" award. It'll go to any company employing copy protection. Let us eliminate this scourge from the software industry within our lifetimes. Together, we can do it.

Art Wittmann can be reached at awittmann@nwc.com.