> Furthermore, the resources that you would need to spend constantly cracking newer versions just isn't worth it when similar capital could be spent building home grown alternatives.
Zero of these programs have any level of copy protection remotely resembling Denuvo: no virtualization, debug symbols are commonly left intact.
You don't need gaming style DRM like Denuvo to make it a pain. Logic Programming is hard, and bug fixes are constant - especially for anything 14nm and lower. A cracked EDA or PDK becomes useless fairly quickly if not constantly updated.
And the name of the game that's happening now is offering EDAs only via SaaS - the removing a major vector for piracy.
Yeah, but try using them without _constant_ support and see… even for mature nodes, even with experienced teams you keep running into tool limits that make it impossible to get anything done without going back to support.
Core functionality is typically bug free, but they do work with customers on new features, and will use those as case studies to showcase to even more customers.
Zero of these programs have any level of copy protection remotely resembling Denuvo: no virtualization, debug symbols are commonly left intact.