General Could forum cloud hosting be an anti-piracy solution?

[Sinistra]

So, Piracy has been around for, well ages. When we think of pirates, we think of the giant ships with sails and the Jollyrodger flag. As they board other ships and take things that aren't theirs and that they didn't pay for. Today is no different, with piracy of things like movies, music, software, and other digital things. Premium and name-brand software such as Photoshop and DaVinci Resolve are prime examples of stuff that can be pirated. These are the top programs used for video and photo editing. Yet if you look in the right place you could find a version you can use without paying for it. Forum software is no different. you could be surfing the web and stumble across a community, unknown to you could be running on a forum software that has been altered to where it won't or can't be tracked by the developer. So my question is, Do you think cloud hosting could be a way to battle piracy when it comes to forum software? With the push to Cloud hosted services for the cost of most hosting plans you can host your forum with the developer. If you go this route you get full access to their software that is hosted on their servers, the ability to add modifications, and themes. and also get some cool features that are only offered to cloud-hosted forums.

Do you really think this could stop piracy when it comes to forums if the devs go strictly for cloud-based services? and if they do require you to go cloud would you do it? and what would this mean for self-hosted communities.

(P.S. I tried this topic last night and completely confused myself so I hope people get what I am trying to get at. lol)

 

[Dismal_Bliss]

Well a cloud only service can't be copied unless it was hacked which is very unlikely.

I would not let a company force me onto the cloud through some underhanded means. Intuit Quickbooks did this by nearly quadrupling the price of their desktop software and locking it if you didn't pay, forcing everyone to the cloud. Now we pay monthly for a cloud product that sucks in comparison with the excellent desktop product we had been using for over a decade. Intuit is evil.

The next company that tries to force all their clients to the cloud using such dirty tactics, I will promptly find an alternative.

 

[Sinistra]

Well a cloud only service can't be copied unless it was hacked which is very unlikely.

I would not let a company force me onto the cloud through some underhanded means. Intuit Quickbooks did this by nearly quadrupling the price of their desktop software and locking it if you didn't pay, forcing everyone to the cloud. Now we pay monthly for a cloud product that sucks in comparison with the excellent desktop product we had been using for over a decade. Intuit is evil.

The next company that tries to force all their clients to the cloud using such dirty tactics, I will promptly find an alternative.

I would have to agree, that this is a double-edged sword you would on one side have the potential to stop piracy, but on the other side, you could lose your entire client base if you go strictly to a cloud-based service. It's just not worth the headache of trying to keep your software from being pirated. You have to rely on an honest community base that is willing to pay for your software which will balance out the cost of loss due to piracy. But do you think the lower cost of the software would stop piracy? Granted the forum software that shall not be named! has dropped their prices and has not really seen an increase in sales. Mainly because they don't add new features and still have the same iframe admin CP that they did back in the day. But again they have cheap cloud hosting plans the only downside is you can't add modifications. Companies like Invision Board and xenForo allow you to mod their software in a cloud environment. So all in all cloud hosted communities would be more of a convenience than anything else.

 

[Aussie]

It would be difficult to mod to make unique if it was all cloud based and locked down. In order to do a lot of mods you need access to all the code, and if you have access to all the code you can essentially clone or copy it... also not a fan of cloud hosting as I have stated previously because censorship can be done easier, and then technically you will never own the data on your own forums as well....

 

[Cedric]

It would be difficult to mod to make unique if it was all cloud based and locked down. In order to do a lot of mods you need access to all the code, and if you have access to all the code you can essentially clone or copy it... also not a fan of cloud hosting as I have stated previously because censorship can be done easier, and then technically you will never own the data on your own forums as well....

Come to think of it, it's essentially like a free hosted forum, only packed with more features and the fact you're paying for it.

 

[Aussie]

Actually you made me google it as I am confusing myself, not sure this article has cleared that confusion up, but to me I think the actual hosting is almost essentially the same, to clarify maybe I'm wrong in my previous post.

Lets assume we are talking xenforo based site here

1. Can you customize your web hosting version more, I think potentially yes. Could it be more difficult to customize your web hosting verion, again potentially yes it could be harder.
2. Can you upgrade your server speed and specs easy, potentially easier with cloud hosting although web not that difficult as your host should do most the back end.
3. Who owns the information, I still think with Cloud hosting they potentially own more of your info and are in more control since they have installed the software for you
4. Cloud hosting they will update xenforo for you, some web hosting also does this though with say wordpress
5. Is cloud hosting more like being on a shared server? not sure about this one... but we do know that cheap web hosting is 9/10 times on a shared server.

Its probably more about how much can you customise your website cloud v web hosting.

link: Article Cloud V Web Hosting

 

[Empire]

My experience with AWS is that it’s only as secure as you make it. You define the rules that govern access to your data, you control the access keys. AWS is just a set of tools, it’s really easy to misuse and misconfigure things and make them insecure. But if you know what you are doing it’s possible to make things extremely secure.

 

[Arantor]

Why do you think so many software packages have gone down the as-a-service model? Not only is it effective anti-piracy, you get to keep paying over and over for it.

Consider that the next time you moan about how bad the free options are.

 

[Ravenfreak]

DaVinci Resolve is free, unless you want some extra features btw, so it's not fully proprietary software. However, I wonder if this is the reason why Adobe only offers cloud subscriptions to their software now. If every software goes cloud based though, I don't think many people would be happy about it. Would it cut back on piracy? Most likely, but these companies would be missing out on potential customers and losing current ones to other competitor's software.

 

[Dismal_Bliss]

However, I wonder if this is the reason why Adobe only offers cloud subscriptions to their software now.

While they call it "Adobe Creative Cloud" you actually download the programs on your PC. The "cloud" features is cloud storage, downloadable images and clip art, etc.

 

[Ravenfreak]

While they call it "Adobe Creative Cloud" you actually download the programs on your PC. The "cloud" features is cloud storage, downloadable images and clip art, etc.

Oh I was under the impression it went all cloud based lol. I think I got confused because on their website they mention "Creative Cloud Plans" which makes it seem like it's all cloud based now.

 

[joelr]

Why do you think so many software packages have gone down the as-a-service model? Not only is it effective anti-piracy, you get to keep paying over and over for it.

Consider that the next time you moan about how bad the free options are.

Bad free options are ... still bad. (Not a knock against any free software, and I recommend more users to test the waters with free solutions)

Also, can you even pirate free forum software?? 🤔😆

 

[Arantor]

Also, can you even pirate free forum software?? 🤔😆

Yes. Some history is worth knowing. Also it's worth understanding that 'free' has some interesting connotations depending on how you care to define free, whether that's free-as-in-beer, free-as-in-speech or something else.

SMF exists because of shenanigans that happened with its predecessor YABBSE. Specifically, someone took YABBSE, changed all the copyright notices to 'ttForum' and tried to claim it as theirs. But it had security issues from upstream that weren't fixed (even though they were fixed in YABBSE) and was just all around a bad time.

There were people who tried to claim this was legal under the GPL licence (which is what YABBSE was released as) but it's not (nor ever was legal under any version of the GPL) and in the end YABBSE was abandoned and a complete from-scratch do-over happened in the form of SMF with a newer restrictive licence.

Most relevant for most people, the licence prior to 2.0 didn't allow forking at all, and it *required* you put the copyright in the footer. There were people in the SMF team writing to hosting companies on a regular (weekly) basis to inform them that their customers were infringing the licence of the software they were using by removing or hiding the footer without permission.

So yes, software you can download for no money can still be pirated. Even today there are vestiges of this, where the team refuses to provide support if your forum doesn't show the copyright notice in the footer. (Technically it's murky how legal it is to remove it. As long as the copyright is left in the code and the file is present in the zip file, that's *theoretically* good enough. Everything else is a moral debate rather than a legal one.)