[Sascha Franck]

There's one thing people often seem to forget when it comes to somewhat "obtrusive" copy protection schemes (which includes dongles but even more so C/R). What if the company you bought your product from goes bankrupt?
Let's say you have a bunch of IKMM (or NI, or whatever) products and you want to install them on your fine new computer. Now, with the company going bankrupt, you could as well just flush them plugins down the toilet - or does anybody really expect the companies in question to keep their authorisation servers online in case they are indeed bankrupt for the next number of years (until the plugin format becomes obsolete)? Ok, at least NI has it on their site that, should something like that ever happen, would give out permanent authorisation codes to their customers. But who knows whether that'd happen indeed...
Then, let's assume you lose or break your Cubase dongle but Steinberg just went bankrupt. Forget about all your precious Cubase projects, you will never be able to open them again unless you find a second hand dongle.
And finally, you won't be able to sell your software anymore, either.

As you can see, this is where any hardware analogies completely fail. As long as I find some techs that will do service jobs, I can drive any oldtimer car until the end of the days of fuel as we know it.
If I lose my car key, I can get a replacement, even if the company is bankrupt, too, given I can provide a certificate of ownership.
And I can obviously sell my Strat without any "ok" from Fender, let alone paying a transfer fee.

In the case of Steinberg, the hardware analogy (aka "a dongle is like a key to your car") fails even more. If you lose your dongle, their policy is that you have to buy an entirely new license. There's no reduced price, no nothing. This is more or less like them accusing you of theft ("oh no, we're sure you didn't lose it but gave it to someone else"). Fortunately, they started thinking about the situation after some pretty nasty debates on Cubase.net - but that's a while ago already and it's still not happening.
Anyway, as said, this has got nothing to do with a dongle being the same as a key. It's really not the software license that is of any value, it's that little piece of plastic and metal only.

And this is exactly why I applaud any companies who don't get in your way at all, regarding copy protection. Heck, look at Reaper - and they seem to be doing well. And, with Reaper it's not only that you don't have to worry about lost dongles or authorisation servers not working or anything like that - you can even run it from a USB stick. You could even partition your USB stick and run it on either Windows or OSX. That's what I call customer service. And Reaper seems to be doing quite well. Sure, with absolutely no copy protection (others than a reminder once you're past evaluation time), I'm sure there will be lots of folks using Reaper "irregularly", but OTOH there seem to be a whole lot of people praising this unobtrusive way of dealing with copy protection by purchasing a license, regardless whether they're using Reaper often (or even at all).

And as a last thing, about all that "using a dongle I can take my plugins with me to any studio" stuff... in all seriousness, how many more or less professional studios do you know that would even let you near their precious machine rooms to install some software that they're usually not using? Especially given the bad track record of something like, say, the PACE drivers (such as doing pretty malicious things to your system, especially true for Windows but partially for Mac OS as well), regardless whether these issues have been adressed or not - in case those drivers aren't installed already, no studio owner (or maintainance tech) would let you install that stuff on their systems, unless you're really good friends with them.
Again, with a single .dll, .vst or .component file, things may already look quite different. Even more so if a scenario such as the Reaper one would be possible.

Oh, and yet another thing: For someone being on the road often, dongles simply suck. Admittedly, they do suck even more in case you're using a hopelessly underequipped machine such as any Macbook, but even with 4 onboard USB ports the situation isn't exactly shiny in case you're really working on your lap. Ok, the Syncrosoft dongle is rather small, so chances of someone stumbling against it (hence probably damaging your USB slot or even the dongle) are not too big, but look at that WAY too large iLok POS (it's almost twice as long as the Syncrosoft one)! It's unnecessarily huge and there's quite some chances you would sort of bend it while working mobile.
Yes, I have both an iLok and a Syncrosoft dongle, and no, they're not exactly putting me away from probably missing out on some fine software, but one thing is for sure: As soon as I have an alternative choice, I certainly know what to purchase. Hence, almost all of my projects can be opened without any dongles attached - fwiw, I'm mainly using Logic, NI Komplete, all things U-He, all things FXpansion, AA Reverb, a bit of IKMM stuff (which got de-authorized by installing OSX.5.7 - Apple stinks again), Overloud stuff, Rob Papen thingies, etc. All very fine plugins, none of them requiring a dongle. Heck, Zebra 2 IMO is one of the best softsynths on the market right now (perhaps even the best in case you don't need sample import functions) and it's using the least obtrusive copy protection there is: A simple serial number - and AFAIK, Urs is not having plans to change that any day soon.
So, even if I have a few dongle protected things, I will rather not use them much at all. And that's no good advertising for said companies, either. Seriously, quite sometimes people are wowing at the guitar sounds I'm getting during my little backstage jams, using Overlouds TH-1. But they will never wow at the guitar sounds coming out of, say, the Studio Room amp sims - simply because no dongle will ever see any backstage room. I always leave the dongles at home.

Ok, enough drivel for now.

- Sascha