I say so because the trend has clearly been away from mandatory dongles as software protection, not the other way around. Audio software is one of the last bastions of such copy protection, in exactly the kind of customer environment you describe (i.e. a lot of hobbyist/prosumer users among the customer base) and nowadays even here the incentive to at least offer a choice is there, as per the quick list of names in my previous post, prompted by the claim of "That's it in history who has moved away from dongle. In 14 years."chk071 wrote:But how can you say that? As i mentioned above, it's a few forum users which usually complain about dongles, the sales figures are the important thing, and if those don't suffer over dongle protection, companies don't have a compelling reason to move away from such a copy protection.
Logically, if there are potential paying customers who prefer one method over the other, that is, some potential customers prefer a dongle and some don't, it makes most sense to offer both methods. This way, when you need to have DRM, the physical dongle becomes a bonus for the ones who wish to have that portability, and not a requirement for everyone.
I don't feel strongly about this myself, and usually don't take part in these conversations, so forgive me for going so off topic in a random thread . It's just funny that dongles are still a "thing" in daw land and we're soon living the year 2016. Back on topic, sorry.