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More On Policing Shareware
RHW22 writes "Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro looks at shareware, focusing on the question of whether or not this industry can survive if people never actually cough up $$ for the product. He mentions Ambrosia Software, 'a developer of Macintosh games and utilities in Rochester, N.Y., could stop guessing after it revised its payment system last year. The new system aims to stop people from using pirated registration codes in two ways.' Read his column here." We mentioned this several weeks ago, with a link to Ambrosia's description of their system and what led to its adoption.
If the way you are using it is by not paying for it, when asked to, then it is piracy. There is no fair use, and there should not be, on stolen software. There's lots, and there should be, of fair use for software that is not stolen. If I require you to pay me for a copy of my software and you don't like it then fuck you; write your own.
In 1986 people were saying "Shareware is in trouble. If people don't start paying for shareware, it will disappear. 16 years later, there's more shareware than ever
From the same authors? I believe that as more and more people learn to program that more people will release shareware in the delusion that "people will support me in doing something useful for them at a fair price". Of course the reality is that people like you simply want to hang around until someone with some ability does something and then freeload on them. Eventually most shareware writers realise what a mug they're being and stop donating to the "I have the right to use any software" brigade.
Hmmmm..... let's see now .... Lotus is being destroyed by "piracy" but they made so much money that they can afford to pay their CEO $27 million. Something doesn't add up.
Indeed. What does not add up is that big companies like Lotus (was) spend huge amounts on marketing and other non-software items to try to sell into other big companies. This money has to be recouped and with profits to spare for the shareholders. They naturally are very vocal about losing millions of dollars worth of sales, just as shareware authors are vocal about losing hundreds of dollars worth of sales. But, so what? Are you just saying that it's okay to steal from people that can afford to take the loss? What loss can you afford to have stolen?
Before we get the "nothing's been stolen; Lotus still have their software" crap I think you should understand that when software is stolen by shitheads like yourself what is actually stolen is time. I spend my time writing software. I charge for that time; in a very real sense I never charge for software; my job includes testing, bug fixing and even some user support and I don't get an itemised pay cheque at the end of the month. I get paid for my time.
Now, think about that ..... millions of people downloading millions of songs for free and yet there was no significant decrease in music sales.
Yes, that's because Napster were forcing the shareware model on the musinc industry. "Try a band." could have been their motto. Due to the poor level of service they gave the users actually bought more music because they couldn't be bothered with the long, tedious, buggy process of downloading whole albums most of the time. So they tried the shareware version and went to the store for the full version. They would not have bothered their asses if Napster had worked well.
The movie industry is lying about their "problems" at the moment but one day it will be possible to easily download full movies without paying for them and then there will be a problem.
The casual copying of material is irrelevant and has zero impact on the profits of the people who create the material.
This is a bare-faced lie.
When software costs less than 20 dollars there is no reason for casual copying - there is no way that each and every copy made was not affordable by the thief. I accept that many people who use Office simply would not have forked out 500 quid for it anyway and so MS is no worse off (better off since they've got free training and advertising), but at shareware prices even this lame excuse simply does not apply.
My current form of charity-ware is open source but it's not possible to make a living from that. I don't mind donating my time for it as I use the time donated by other people to help me but I'm under no illusions as to how hard parasites like you would make it for me to pay my mortgage if I tried to work like that all the time,
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"