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id CEO Claims PC Hardware Manufacturers Love Piracy
arcticstoat sends a link to an interview with the CEO of id Software, Todd Hollenshead, in which he suggests that hardware manufacturers count on piracy to help drive profits, rather than doing something to prevent it. Quoting:
"...I think that there's been this dirty little secret among hardware manufacturers, which is that the perception of free content — even if you're supposed to pay for it on PCs — is some sort hidden benefit that you get when you buy a PC, like a right to download music for free or a right to download pirated movies and games. ...And I think that just based on their actions...what they say is one thing, but what they do is another. When it comes into debates about whether peer-to-peer file-sharing networks that by-and-large have the vast majority, I'm talking 99 per cent of the content is illicitly trading copyrighted property, they'll come out on the side of the 1 per cent of the user doing it for legitimate benefit."
Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984) (emphasis added)
Your first paragraph is 100% wrong. I don't know what time period you're talking about, but it's clearly NOT when Microsoft gained their dominance back in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Windows 3.1 and WFW 3.11 came on something like 11-13 floppy disks and there was NO copy protection of any kind. NONE. People were used to DOS but could now have this fancy GUI-driven "operating system" for the cost of a box of 3.5" floppies. NO ONE that I knew in the PC world ever had to buy a copy of Windows 3.1 because they always had either a friend or someone at work who had the floppies.
The availability of Windows 3.1 through piracy "sneakernet" made it the de facto standard on all PCs once it was clear that the world was leaving DOS and going to Windows. That laid down almost the entire user base for Windows 95, who then moved to 98, etc.
The dominance of most of the major software out there ESPECIALLY Windows is due to piracy, and the software companies know it.
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...pirating id's stuff.
That's how Id got big, remember? Doom was pirated a lot, and that made it a big hit.
To some extent, sure. However, Doom had a demo, and as I recall, that's what made it popular. Quake had the first quarter of the game as a demo, and I know a lot of people who routinely copied things from friends who each bought themselves copies of Quake.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
None of what you say is true for OS X development. The whole "commissar" bit is great emotive writing, but flawed because it's simply untrue.
iPhone development definitely has some issues when it comes to developing apps that you want to sell at Apple's online store, but you just can't extend that to OS X development and go on a tirade with any honesty.
I'm a developer, who actually analyses & writes code for a living. Code that actually has to work (actually I'm a consultant, currently developing for a bank, the current instance of the database that my code has to work against was, I'm not kidding, started before I was born. And it's still running. How do you query it ? You take a terminal change "a part of the 80x25 screen" (I'm not kidding), then write "+SAM" and it executes everything above the current cursor and changes the text into the response. Now imagine doing that from C++ code. That's what "it needs to work" means. Oh btw, this method of working is, I kid you not, called "EASY". And apparently, compared to it's predecessor, it is easy).
Let's say I want to start apple programming, let's evaluate what I need :
-> an apple desktop or laptop. The bottom end or second-hand simply won't run os X (or won't run it acceptably or for very long), we're talking at least $1300 to $1800. I can only buy this directly from apple, no competition or alternatives exist here
-> a membership of apple's "development club" : $99 (a month I believe)
-> I need to get my software into the apple stores and into shop.apple.com, because there is no other channel. And if it doesn't follow apple's interpretation of the "user interface guidelines" (which quicktime violates rougly in the manner a fat pakistani violates a goat) it's just not going to happen
-> I need to learn & develop my software in objective C. Again, there is no (useable) alternative with support from apple. To add insult to injury, nobody else uses objC (well I believe there is a linux desktop environment in the language).
On windows ... buy myself a $499 laptop (which will more than do, and come with windows). I pick whatever company I want (one that's close for example) to sell it to me. I get a beer the next time I see the guy selling it to me in a cafe. I download visual studio express (which knocks the socks of xcode, but I will fully admit xcode is useable), which let's me develop, fully supported (and even free) in C#, C++, Basic, F#, Python (after a few downloads from microsoft reasearch). I download another dev environment, eclipse (by ibm) or one by sun, and I develop in java. I download another and develop in pascal. Support is available, even from microsoft, for all of these languages, and they're open and widely used, including used by microsoft.
I go to the nearest company, and they have 10 programs they're willing to pay me to develop. I go to the nearest shop, even did this with a supermarket once, and they're willing to sell boxed versions of software I wrote. There are thousands of places like that within a kilometer of where I live.
And you're seriously wondering why microsoft wins ?
You are suffering from PDD, in that you're a user, and you're blaming me for not going to 10x more trouble to develop for mac os x for half the price, because "it looks better".
But we all know the real deal : you want me to jump through 10 times more hoops to sell applications to you, and I will ask you 10 times the price of a windows application.
Of course, you consider this unfair.
To that, I will respond with a fully meant, eloquently put and most satisfying "fuck you". Then you do not buy, I cut my losses and go back to windows. Cya !