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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.
IMHO, most stuff marketed as shareware is really demoware.
If it can't save - It's a demo
If it pops up excessive nag screens - It's a demo
If major functionality is locked - It's a demo
TODO: Something witty here...
Shareware authors, and everyone on the internet for that matter, need to ask "Why would I spend my money on this"? I'm sick of hearing websites complain that people don't register for what amounts to a few worthless extras. Would you register for that worthless trash? No? Don't complain.
A good example: If I didn't view the slashdot subscription as a tipjar, there is no way I would EVER consider paying for it. As a long time /.'er, I probabably will.
The shareware, software, or service I see being successful is that which has a service behind it.
Codeweaver's Crossover plugin is arguably worth the money. (As an above poster said, this really isn't shareware as much as it is a demo though.) Those that provide extras for registering - such as sending a CD. For the internet age, DigitalBlasphemy is a another excellent example. Providing an excellent freeware sample gallery, and then a relatively low annual fee for access to the full gallary and then discounts to artwork CD's/etc...
When providing something extra to those that pay, the honor system works. When treating your customers DECENTLY, the honor system works. But when you suspect your cutomers to be criminal from the start, and treat them like trash, you deserve what you get. Registration of shareware should be EASY - not something that requires a complete hardware identification of my machine, 3 CDKey's, all my personal information, and a blood sample. - And if they aren't having that many people register - they're probably asking too much or selling trash.
What the internet needs a little bit of old-style business sense. Something I see almost none of.
------ 24.5% slashdot pure
This is an interesting debate.
/dev/null..
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I think shareware authors should be paid for their work. Shareware is cheap, shareware is great..
But...
In fact, I tried on 3 instances to buy/register shareware.. and this is what happened.. I think this is part of the problem...
1)Trumpet (a TCP IP stack from several years ago).
Buy the program, registration never shows up in m ail.. wait.. email back and forth..wait some more.. in meantime, trial expires, re-install wait somemore. Client I am billing hours for is getting unhappy.. Calling to Australia to get it sorted out was not fun either.
2)DFX (an sound effects addin for winamp)
Liked it, and tried to buy a copy with their VISA card purchase screen... then.. nothing happens.. no registration comes.. nothing..wait days... nothing happens, no reply, no program... nothing.. I write email to them.. nothing happens..no reply..
Finally I *CALLED* the company, to ask them what is going on. They said that my visa transaction was rejected (but they never bothered to inform me of this, even though they collected my email address (just to send me spam I guess?). When I asked the sales rep at DFX what is wrong, they told me that my destination address and billing address were different, (I am an expat overseas) so.. transaction just gets automatically rejected, bin'ed.. period. No mail, no reply, no followup, nothing.. rejects just goes to
They didn't email me when the Visa was rejected (or ask where I live.. or anything), nor did they even bother to reply my original emails.
The answer the DFX rep gave me on the phone to all this was... "well, it is just a $15 program, so we can't spend too much effort (ie any!) to deal with things that might come up".
3)NJstar
It is a great program. But they wanted me to send checks to Australia or something in AUS dollars.. gee.. how to I do that.. the bank will charge me $50 in processing fees (after waiting in 3 lines at 20 minutes a pop because no one would know how to draw up a foreign denominated check), for a $25 program..
Those are my stories..
..and people wonder why they don't register their shareware...?!.
...because it is too complicated
to pay for it, thats why.. fix that, and then
I am ready to buy lots of great stuff.. but
right now it is just too much hassle I discovered,
so I just stay away from it..
There is a variant of this system that would be virtually impossible to crack... Intel & AMD would have to embed a private key in the CPU core. When buying software, you would present the public key that corresponds to your CPU. The software vendor would check this against a list of valid keys published by Intel (to prevent people from making their own key pairs), encrypt the software using your public key, and then send it to you. Your CPU would decrypt the code as it executes using the private key embedded in it. The binary would not work on any other CPU.
A hardware-based system like this is many orders of magnitude more secure than a software-based system, because the software remains encrypted all the way up to the CPU. The only way to break it would be to find one of the embedded private keys ($$$ equipment)... Or to convince a software vendor to encrypt with a made-up key that you know both public & private parts of...
BTW, this is also the basic framework for audio/video copy-prevention systems. (CSS works like this, except there are only a handful of private keys, and the CSS encryption algorithm is flawed)