Just wondering cause umm I've read interviews with the GOG guys and they say they're against DRM and say great things about The Witcher: Enhanced Edition (original buyers get it free etc)..but that game was made by an affiliate company and has the TAGES copy protection system on it..I know they're separate teams and all, still, seems odd, not that there's any distrust. Anyone from the GOG team have any insight into this?

Remember, that the publisher of The Witcher is Atari. The publisher is always responsible for agreements with distributors, not the game developer.

You are awesome. I am buying The Witcher EE immediately after I'll receive my paycheck : ).

Went by Circuit City last night, and they didn't have it, if that had I would have picked it up in a second.

Thanks for the reply!
I want to get it but TAGES sounds pretty nasty..if/when it comes to GOG I'll definitely be getting it. :)

Yeah, but best buy isn't closing and selling it's remaing inventory for upto 45% off!

Tages is no panacea but it's far better than StarForce or SecuROM.

I'm not too sure about that, actually. Taken from Wikipedia:
"The usage of Tagès in The Witcher, spawned some controversy. Upon detecting a supposedly pirated copy, Tagès quietly and undetectably sabotages the content of the game to the point it was unwinnable by making certain key non-player characters disappear permanently."
I would much prefer false positives to manifest in an error popup, not game-breaking bugs silently creeping into the game.
Or heck, just throw up a bunch of pictures explaining the consequences of your choices, like it works for the rest of the game. "As a result of pirating the game, <NPC name here> has mysteriously perished. Now Geralt is without a lead, and is doomed to wander aimlessly for all eternity".

Yeah, sabotaging in-game content, in my experience, always backfires in a huge way.
Remember Titan Quest? It had authenticity checks that would result in a crash to desktop if failed. Problem is tons of pirates would get them but not know it was a security check, and they'd flood forums complaining the game was buggy and it got a bad rep. At least according the developer, who claims it was part of the reason for the games commercial performance:
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=42663

I'm not sure how much stock you should put into that Wikipedia article. I cruised The Witcher boards from the time of release and I can't recall one single reference to anything like that with regards to Tages.

See here. ;)

Actually, as far as I am aware from some research and my experience with Beyond Good and Evil, Tagès does give the normal quit-with-error when the CD check fails. But Tagès provides the facility to allow the implementors to design glitches for the game that occur when the copy-protection has been bypassed (rather than when it fails). I presume that this is used in The Witcher. The rationale for silent errors occuring subtly and deep into the game is that this makes it extremely difficult for crackers to know whether or not they have been successful. Indeed, I have yet to see a Tagès crack that leaves the game winnable. Also, working disc images for Tagès games are really hard to create.
The makers of Tagès did and amazing job at copy-protection and crack-prevention, and AFAIK the driver is more benign than those of the other major copy-protection schemes (particularly StarForce - yikes). Unfortunately, bypassing copy protection is important for me, so I avoid buying Tagès games (although I made a concession recently and bought Beyond Good and Evil after learning that I could hex edit savegames to make them winnable again).