Last post I went along with a NYT article (and apparently recent court case) in describing Digital Restrictions Management as crippleware. Bad call on my part.

Traditionally crippleware is free and its aim is to get you to buy a non-crippled version. With DRM you pay for crippled media and its aim to ensure the media stays crippled. Is there any widely deployed DRM that offers to turn itself off completely for the right price?

Perhaps a better term, if not from the customer’s perspective then that of certain businesses, is suicideware. Case in point, Windows Vista. I was reminded of this when Boing Boing just pointed (again) to A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection, the “executive executive summary” of which is “The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.”

From the aforementioned customer’s perspective, traditional suicideware is just temporally crippled-ware. For a software business, perhaps suicideware (I’m making this up) is that which forgets who the customers are, tempting the gods of randomness. Rouletteware? Deathwishware?