While I agree with your point about using the law to inflict undue harm, Amazon's proper recourse is to take it to a judge, as you mentioned... They can sue. However, the law says they cannot unduly charge your credit card. That is fraud. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Being that Pegasus and Mercury were both free, I don't see how this is a free market in action. The lack of funding is from support licenses and manual purchases (as in RTFM). Many of his older base didn't need the manuals but purchased them anyway. I think if he would have just started charging for the product about 4 years ago, we wouldn't be in this situation. A lot of people still use both programs, judging by my contacts and PMAIL and Mercury Mailing lists.
Let's be completely clear here. David has never charged for his software. The only income he made off this is for the manuals purchased and his tech support. There is no and never has been a cash cow in support licences. As it was pointed out on the Mercury mailing list, we probably put a dent in his manual purchases by the help we offered. Cash cow indeed.
Frankly, I would be just as happy if he made Mercury commercial software. Many of his supporters, myself included, have already told him that we would be willing to pay an annual fee or pay for each upgrade or something like that. Mercury is a wonderful home-user MTA and I know of several companies (the one I work for included) that use it as well. It's easy to setup and has good 3rd-party spam filtering built for it. It's worked well for me for several years.
Dude... really. You are making this be much harder than it really is. Saying 10 bytes or 80 bits changes nothing. They are the same measurment. The overhead argument that you keeping posting about is a strawman and has nothing to do with the other poster's point. A 100 Mbit LAN can be just as easily described as a 12.5 MB LAN. This is no different than saying something is a centimeter or converting it to a millimeter. He's right that any non-tech person will associate with megabytes (since it relates to file-size) much faster than they do to megabits. To be honest, I had to tell my wife how many mp3's that was a second, generally.
And this is how many Americans feel as well. From my internet dealings, local talks, etc, it is pretty easy for me to see that many would love to get both the Dems and the Reps out of office and go with independant parties or at least get an independant in power (maybe Libertarian). However, it is common knowledge over on this side of the pond that to give a vote to an independant could put the real bastards into office because your vote didn't actually OPPOSE him. So many pick what they believe to be the lesser of two evils.
Since you are suggesting that we go ahead and burden the American people with the taxes that will be needed to make all these changes for our blind brethren (and sisters), could we go ahead and leave the "In God We Trust" off the money so that us Atheists can feel that we aren't being discriminated against by our government (the one that is suppose to have a seperation of church and state?).
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While I agree with your point about using the law to inflict undue harm, Amazon's proper recourse is to take it to a judge, as you mentioned... They can sue. However, the law says they cannot unduly charge your credit card. That is fraud. Two wrongs don't make a right.
LOL... You are commenting on software that you haven't tried in 10 years! WoW.
The market decided that they didn't need support or manuals, not that they didn't want the FREE programs.
Being that Pegasus and Mercury were both free, I don't see how this is a free market in action. The lack of funding is from support licenses and manual purchases (as in RTFM). Many of his older base didn't need the manuals but purchased them anyway. I think if he would have just started charging for the product about 4 years ago, we wouldn't be in this situation. A lot of people still use both programs, judging by my contacts and PMAIL and Mercury Mailing lists.
Let's be completely clear here. David has never charged for his software. The only income he made off this is for the manuals purchased and his tech support. There is no and never has been a cash cow in support licences. As it was pointed out on the Mercury mailing list, we probably put a dent in his manual purchases by the help we offered. Cash cow indeed.
Frankly, I would be just as happy if he made Mercury commercial software. Many of his supporters, myself included, have already told him that we would be willing to pay an annual fee or pay for each upgrade or something like that. Mercury is a wonderful home-user MTA and I know of several companies (the one I work for included) that use it as well. It's easy to setup and has good 3rd-party spam filtering built for it. It's worked well for me for several years.
Dude... really. You are making this be much harder than it really is. Saying 10 bytes or 80 bits changes nothing. They are the same measurment. The overhead argument that you keeping posting about is a strawman and has nothing to do with the other poster's point. A 100 Mbit LAN can be just as easily described as a 12.5 MB LAN. This is no different than saying something is a centimeter or converting it to a millimeter. He's right that any non-tech person will associate with megabytes (since it relates to file-size) much faster than they do to megabits. To be honest, I had to tell my wife how many mp3's that was a second, generally.
And this is how many Americans feel as well. From my internet dealings, local talks, etc, it is pretty easy for me to see that many would love to get both the Dems and the Reps out of office and go with independant parties or at least get an independant in power (maybe Libertarian). However, it is common knowledge over on this side of the pond that to give a vote to an independant could put the real bastards into office because your vote didn't actually OPPOSE him. So many pick what they believe to be the lesser of two evils.
Since you are suggesting that we go ahead and burden the American people with the taxes that will be needed to make all these changes for our blind brethren (and sisters), could we go ahead and leave the "In God We Trust" off the money so that us Atheists can feel that we aren't being discriminated against by our government (the one that is suppose to have a seperation of church and state?).