On December 2, 2008, customers of SonicWALL woke up to broken firewalls. This wasn’t the result of a real problem in the firewalls; it was a result of SonicWALL’s DRM server malfunctioning and deactivating all customer firewalls.
The relationship between customers and vendors of proprietary software is fundamentally adversarial: proprietary vendors have business models where customer activity (like installing Windows on a desktop) requires payment to the vendor. Because the activity happens entirely on the customer side and paying the vendor conflicts with the customer’s desire to save money, proprietary software vendors don’t trust their customers to pay them.
Copyright and licensing