alt Hacker NewsUnfortunately, you either put all the commercially interesting bits on your own server and let your customers eat the latency, or you ship it to the edge and let piracy decimate your profits. I don't think there is any technical way out of this, and probably not any reasonable legal ways.
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tcfhgj • today at 6:27 PM
and here we are ... capitalism
I feel like you're hitting at the real reason why so much of this happens. Not necessarily the piracy, but centralized control of the data and data flow. Even if it's slow as hell to send off that data to proprietary company servers (or rented cloud servers) to verify it, you're still verifying it. You, as in you the company, can't do that if it's local compute only. You can't control whether the user installed your paid plugin or some free alternative. You can't control someone stripping out libraries or code to remove intentional friction points designed to annoy them into a higher tier of the software. You can't control whether or not they update, or whether or not you can force the software into end-of-life with an update despite it still functioning.
If there's a connection to your services outside of the user's machine you can control all of that.