Dear people at Vienna,
First of all, everyone on this forum and also those reading and contributing to this (a bit angry) thread, thinks that you do a damn good job and produce good products. Honestly, the email I quoted in my previous post makes me smile a bit, in the sense that it shows how hard it is for you too to deal with this mess of the key/license/authorization/whatever without ending up in a some contraddiction.
Nobody here thinks you are bad or evil, nobody wants to see you go banckrupt and thus everyone understands your need to protect your products. However, since the introduction of the SE your company has been faced with a problem that currently you are simply refusing to acknowledge. Namely, that while your copy protection scheme worked and works perfectly fine for professionals, with SE you have started to target a new type of costumer, the non-professionals, for whom your copy protection systems is simply too restrictive and for whom being denied some important information (such as how much one has to pay for lost keys etc) makes a big difference. Obviously you are aware of this, otherwise this information would be printed clearly on your website.
As I said before, we all understand your need to protect your work. On the other hand you need to understand our concerns. We, non professionals, don't have music studio with relative insurances, we use your software with cheap laptops with few USB ports, maybe on a train or plane, maybe in the bits of free time, often tired after having worked long hours at our non-musical jobs. This type of messed-up usage of the key and software drastically increases the chanses of loosing, being stole or breaking a key, compared to a professional. On the other hand we have spent several months wages on your product, and did this simply for passion, we won't make money out of this software, it is not an investment. You have to understand that it is unthinkable for us that such a huge amount of money is linked in such a fragile way to a piece of plastic. And it makes us angry not to have been told clearly at the beginning all the infos regarding the dongle.
We are asking for feasible and reasonable solutions, such as the optional (so that pros don't have to deal with it) temporary license system. We are also saying that we are willing to (reasonalby) pay for it, on top of what we have already paid. Why don't you at least reply us telling us WHY you won't implement it?
Finally, why don't you write a 100% clear and open policy regarding lost keys etc? so that everyone knows what he/she should expect and can easily refer to it? Maybe you will loose a couple of costumers on the short time, but, honestly, it will make you look 10 times more reliable, professional and fair, and you will gain the trust of your current costumers. There are other cool products of yours that I'd like to buy, but I won't, simply because I don't want to run the risk of loosing everything together with a blue USB stick.
With kind regards,
Cesare