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MacHeist "Week of Mac Developer" Causes Schism
ernesto99 writes "MacHeist began selling a software bundle of ten highly sought-after OS X applications last week with the stated goal of raising the profile of Mac shareware developers. 25% of the money brought in goes to charity. The bundle sale will go down as possibly the biggest success in Mac shareware history, as total revenues are approaching $650,000 after only six days. But some observers, including Daring Fireball's John Gruber, have called into question the ethics of MacHeist. MacHeist advertises itself as 'The Week of the Independent Mac Developer,' yet the MacHeist organizers stand to make vastly outsized gains relative to the very developers they have championed. Gruber calculates that MacHeist will record double, if not triple, the profits of all ten participating developers combined. (In fact the promotion has done so well that the promoter-to-developers profit ratio now stands at about four to one.) In an interview, Delicious Library developer Wil Shipley defends his involvement in MacHeist, saying that the publicity and reach of MacHeist has already paid him dividends. The whole affair has created a heated dialogue, resulting in a direct clash among some of the biggest names in the Mac community."
what's all the rucus about?
The ruckus is that MacHeist's professed goal is to help the Mac shareware community, but in the end MacHeist is taking a far larger share of the profits than the participants, and due to the structure of the deal, the greater the sales, the larger the discrepancy becomes.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
You guys are high.. it's not 20%, in fact it gets down to around 2-3%. If ONLY it were a 20% cut.
As a developer, I know that there are costs associated with the marketing and sales of my software, but I think 95%+ of the profits is too high a price. It is effectively worse than the mechanism that RIAA uses. I don't believe that RIAA does flat fee contracts for artists music. It may be a tiny percentage, but at least it's a percentage. The difference is that with flat fee, each additional copy sold means the price per copy goes down more and more.
Wil Shipley is probably doing it because DL 1 has been out for quite some time and he's soon to release Delicious Library 2. So this becomes a promo giveaway of the last version, with the hope of some of them upgrading to DL 2. I doubt he would be giving away Delicious Library 2 in this ordeal.