30 or more years ago I was at a law firm that had some specialized software to pump out the paperwork for residential mortgages. Every so often it would throw an error and refuse to run, which made it really popular with the paralegals who were trying to churn out a dozen mortgages a day. I called the software company. "Oh, that's not a real error, we just prefer that customers check in every so often." I called them many foul names and found out how to disable that shit. Another company sold us perverted Xerox 635 daisywheel printers that were EPROM'd to only work with their particular shitty app-specific typewheels. I had a buddy with an EEPROM burner, and we had several unperverted 635s from which we could draw clean copies. We burned new chips for every printer in the building (65 of them). And back then there wasn't shit the vendor could do. Overnight we repurposed the printers for use with regular PCs and our cost for new METAL xerox typewheels was far less.