To me, the whole OLPC project smacks of cultural bias, and the same smarminess as Kipling's White Man's Burden of the 19th century colonial era.
There are many, -many-, -many- places in the United States where similar democratization of technology would be of immense benefit. I'm not really miffed at the fact that they won't sell one to me. I'm miffed that they aren't working with school districts domestically to address our -internal- needs to spread education and welfare, and instead condescend that other children elsewhere need this sort of "assistance" more.
I'm not implying that they don't need to be given the chance to deal with these problems. I'm just stating that looking afar for opportunities to do good is stupid on the face of it, when there are many worthy domestic persons that need education, funding, and/or encouragement.
It's similar to my feelings around the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Want to do something -really- good? Don't just buy HIV drugs for people overseas. Buy patents, or fund disruptive biotechnology in countries everywhere, to innovate novel drugs, to bust the patent stranglehold on these medicines, and help lift the boat for the undereducated, the sick, and the weary throughout the world, including those in the first world. Highly tanned individuals dead or undereducated overseas are tragic, but similarly dead or undereducated individuals in the first would.. or, *gasp* poor white trash, are every bit as tragic.
If this world is truly a globalist, interconnected, all-singing, all-dancing capitalistic love-fest that means that everybody has superb opportunity, then by all means, let's please help everybody.
N.B.: I'm a native Kentuckian. I clawed out of crap to get where I am today, and I'm proud that I could, but my family were committed to my success. Of the eight other young men who grew up in my immediate area, one is in prison for molesting his daughter- who incidentally was born when he and his girlfriend were 15- three have been in and out of jail for various petty offenses steadily over the last decade or so, one is dead- shot in a robbery attempt, one managed to graduate high school, but has worked crud jobs, and has had many jobs lost over the intervening years.. one managed to hack some college, and is a hotel manager now.. and I managed to get out, get my schooling done, and get a good tech job, and I've since moved on to working at a university. Those are -long-, long odds. And that's one block of white children. That doesn't even take into account the obstacles that young, poor people of color have to get past, nor does it consider gender. Barefoot and pregnant isn't a joke in poor areas. It's a way of life. My own mother was sixteen when I was born. I know whereof I speak.
So really: OLPC for the third world? Super idea. How about OLPC for the ENTIRE world though. The United States is the land of the well-to-do... and the land of shit. We've got plenty of third-world inside our own borders to ignore anymore.
I like your point about charities, but I don't believe that they misrepresented their motives at all, and I don't believe that the efforts in question hurt the given developers.
Realistically speaking, how many of the people who purchased would ever have purchased if not for the "Heist"?
I've been on the fence about Delicious Library since it's release, because it's something that I'd kind of like to have, but not something I absolutely need, and while it's something that I want, the utility of obtaining it didn't overcome my inertia in not going through with purchasing it.
I personally didn't feel motivated enough to steal it, but the existence of mass quantities of pirated software on the P2P nets shows that others are motivated enough to do so. Any amount of reasonable sales are better than no sales at all.. and upgrade revenue is extremely lucrative.
I think the principal problem is one of sour grapes, besides. This is really all about their success, and the fact that their proportion of profit ended up being much greater in the scheme of things than is perceived as "fair".
In the context of the financial success of the MacHeist project, did perhaps developers get a less than ideal deal considering how it turned out? Yes. Do I think that the promoters of the project would be able to pull it off with such a large personal profit margin again? No. Did, realistically, the authors of any of the top-level unlockable pieces of software think they'd even end up having the liability of ponying up the licenses? If I'd been TextMate's author, I absolutely would've taken the chance for some free money and not having to pony up licenses for the purchasers in the end.
In the calculus of financial decisions there's a lot of unpredictability. If only 10,000 in sales had taken place, or maybe 20, do you think the same quantity of anger would've been expressed? If they'd taken a loss, everything would be, "Oh, those poor MacHeist guys. They're not bright. Pity about their effort, but it was a stupid idea."..and that would be the end of it.
And what about the other motivation? The quantity of money given to charities isn't a small quantity. Would I have been willing to drop the money, even at such a low price, if part of it weren't going to those causes as well? Nope. Definitely not. I already own my TextMate license after all.. The particular twist the MacHeist promoters pulled was pretty brilliant, and pretty different versus past shareware aggregation schemes. I hear a lot of hoobajoo about thinking different(ly) being a good thing. How is this not an example thereof?
I might be more apt to agree with you overall, if I hadn't dealt with working in a nonprofit situation, and I hadn't tried to sell my own shareware besides. Shareware authorship is a Pain In The Rear. Maybe, -Maybe- 10% of a given userbase will pay.. and there's the pile of others who don't, and won't ever. There're the people who'll cheerfully, gleefully break any copy protection you implement, and laugh in your face for keeping trying.. Getting dollars in hand for something done on the side isn't bad at all.. and for those who spend their entire lives working on shareware- it's nice security to get cash up front, rather than depending on sales that might or might not come in depending on mood and the phases of the moon.
The charities to which donations were to be made were all relatively worthy, the authors got some money rather than no money (Cf. The Pirate Problem- the puzzle, not the software sales problem), and perhaps most critically.. not a one of the shareware authors themselves have complained.. and there's just No Problem There. So far it's one outsider who refused the offer as given, one talking head who's repeated the meme, and a bunch of other outsiders who're complaining. It's rather a bit like telling someone who needs very much to sell a piece of property for their own motivations, and who is comfortable with making the sale: "Hey, you c
While the MacHeist promoters have gone out of their way to actually _move copies of OS X shareware_ and move them swiftly, Gruber is being nothing but a negativist naysayer, and he's among the MacOS advocates that make me ashamed to be a Mac user every time he opens his mouth.
Worst of all, at a fundamental level, he's engaging in this behavior in order to drive up hits to his blog, and drive up his profile in the community. It's all about increasing his personal revenue at the expense of others. He's nothing more than a John Dvorak-style rabblerouser for the iCult.
I miss the days when NeXTStep was a largely disused platform, because back then, you could have an intelligent conversation with a core-level advocate. Now the quality of discussion is just 2 or 3 shades of gray different from ESR rambling about guns.
The bottom line:
Business is business.
The MacHeist bundle is good business.
The bundled price is going to encourage people who've never dropped a dollar on shareware ever at any point to drop dollars. One dollar, or even two, recovered for a shareware author is significant versus the zero that often gets spent on their software, often by scofflaw-like long-time piratical users.
The bundle also achieves exposure for some of these products that would've been unattainable otherwise. Would I, or anyone I know, ever have spent money on a Pangea game? Nope. Never. iClip? Maybe.. I know others that like it.. but I shy away from user interface altering things like that. For FotoMagico? At $79 normally priced? I would've thought them crazy. Now that I have these things from the bundle? Hooray! Quite cool software. I'm sold on the benefits. I'll be an upgrade customer for at least some of them.
The same goes for at least a few other bundle tools. Getting a license for TextMate and Delicious Library on the cheap is an amazing deal.. and now that I'm invested, however tinily at the outset, each of those developers has potentially made a long-term sale that will result in many times the revenue lost on the individual copies in upgrade revenue. Newsfire's author was particularly cognizant of this issue.. the MacHeist license doesn't come with lifetime upgrades.. but for a tiny figure of 10 dollars more, it's an option right out of the gate. Instant revenue turnover. It's a good, good thing.
I honestly wish that I -had- subscribed to Gruber's blog in the past, so I could have the pleasure of saying to him:
"No, John. No holy wars. No whining. Sit down, shut up, and give me my money back."
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There are many, -many-, -many- places in the United States where similar democratization of technology would be of immense benefit. I'm not really miffed at the fact that they won't sell one to me. I'm miffed that they aren't working with school districts domestically to address our -internal- needs to spread education and welfare, and instead condescend that other children elsewhere need this sort of "assistance" more.
I'm not implying that they don't need to be given the chance to deal with these problems. I'm just stating that looking afar for opportunities to do good is stupid on the face of it, when there are many worthy domestic persons that need education, funding, and/or encouragement.
It's similar to my feelings around the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Want to do something -really- good? Don't just buy HIV drugs for people overseas. Buy patents, or fund disruptive biotechnology in countries everywhere, to innovate novel drugs, to bust the patent stranglehold on these medicines, and help lift the boat for the undereducated, the sick, and the weary throughout the world, including those in the first world. Highly tanned individuals dead or undereducated overseas are tragic, but similarly dead or undereducated individuals in the first would.. or, *gasp* poor white trash, are every bit as tragic.
If this world is truly a globalist, interconnected, all-singing, all-dancing capitalistic love-fest that means that everybody has superb opportunity, then by all means, let's please help everybody.
N.B.: I'm a native Kentuckian. I clawed out of crap to get where I am today, and I'm proud that I could, but my family were committed to my success. Of the eight other young men who grew up in my immediate area, one is in prison for molesting his daughter- who incidentally was born when he and his girlfriend were 15- three have been in and out of jail for various petty offenses steadily over the last decade or so, one is dead- shot in a robbery attempt, one managed to graduate high school, but has worked crud jobs, and has had many jobs lost over the intervening years.. one managed to hack some college, and is a hotel manager now.. and I managed to get out, get my schooling done, and get a good tech job, and I've since moved on to working at a university. Those are -long-, long odds. And that's one block of white children. That doesn't even take into account the obstacles that young, poor people of color have to get past, nor does it consider gender. Barefoot and pregnant isn't a joke in poor areas. It's a way of life. My own mother was sixteen when I was born. I know whereof I speak.
So really: OLPC for the third world? Super idea. How about OLPC for the ENTIRE world though. The United States is the land of the well-to-do... and the land of shit. We've got plenty of third-world inside our own borders to ignore anymore.
Smells like Hall Kinion.
Realistically speaking, how many of the people who purchased would ever have purchased if not for the "Heist"?
I've been on the fence about Delicious Library since it's release, because it's something that I'd kind of like to have, but not something I absolutely need, and while it's something that I want, the utility of obtaining it didn't overcome my inertia in not going through with purchasing it.
I personally didn't feel motivated enough to steal it, but the existence of mass quantities of pirated software on the P2P nets shows that others are motivated enough to do so. Any amount of reasonable sales are better than no sales at all.. and upgrade revenue is extremely lucrative.
I think the principal problem is one of sour grapes, besides. This is really all about their success, and the fact that their proportion of profit ended up being much greater in the scheme of things than is perceived as "fair".
In the context of the financial success of the MacHeist project, did perhaps developers get a less than ideal deal considering how it turned out? Yes. Do I think that the promoters of the project would be able to pull it off with such a large personal profit margin again? No. Did, realistically, the authors of any of the top-level unlockable pieces of software think they'd even end up having the liability of ponying up the licenses? If I'd been TextMate's author, I absolutely would've taken the chance for some free money and not having to pony up licenses for the purchasers in the end.
In the calculus of financial decisions there's a lot of unpredictability. If only 10,000 in sales had taken place, or maybe 20, do you think the same quantity of anger would've been expressed? If they'd taken a loss, everything would be, "Oh, those poor MacHeist guys. They're not bright. Pity about their effort, but it was a stupid idea." ..and that would be the end of it.
And what about the other motivation? The quantity of money given to charities isn't a small quantity. Would I have been willing to drop the money, even at such a low price, if part of it weren't going to those causes as well? Nope. Definitely not. I already own my TextMate license after all.. The particular twist the MacHeist promoters pulled was pretty brilliant, and pretty different versus past shareware aggregation schemes. I hear a lot of hoobajoo about thinking different(ly) being a good thing. How is this not an example thereof?
I might be more apt to agree with you overall, if I hadn't dealt with working in a nonprofit situation, and I hadn't tried to sell my own shareware besides. Shareware authorship is a Pain In The Rear. Maybe, -Maybe- 10% of a given userbase will pay.. and there's the pile of others who don't, and won't ever. There're the people who'll cheerfully, gleefully break any copy protection you implement, and laugh in your face for keeping trying.. Getting dollars in hand for something done on the side isn't bad at all.. and for those who spend their entire lives working on shareware- it's nice security to get cash up front, rather than depending on sales that might or might not come in depending on mood and the phases of the moon.
The charities to which donations were to be made were all relatively worthy, the authors got some money rather than no money (Cf. The Pirate Problem- the puzzle, not the software sales problem), and perhaps most critically.. not a one of the shareware authors themselves have complained.. and there's just No Problem There. So far it's one outsider who refused the offer as given, one talking head who's repeated the meme, and a bunch of other outsiders who're complaining. It's rather a bit like telling someone who needs very much to sell a piece of property for their own motivations, and who is comfortable with making the sale: "Hey, you c
While the MacHeist promoters have gone out of their way to actually _move copies of OS X shareware_ and move them swiftly, Gruber is being nothing but a negativist naysayer, and he's among the MacOS advocates that make me ashamed to be a Mac user every time he opens his mouth. Worst of all, at a fundamental level, he's engaging in this behavior in order to drive up hits to his blog, and drive up his profile in the community. It's all about increasing his personal revenue at the expense of others. He's nothing more than a John Dvorak-style rabblerouser for the iCult. I miss the days when NeXTStep was a largely disused platform, because back then, you could have an intelligent conversation with a core-level advocate. Now the quality of discussion is just 2 or 3 shades of gray different from ESR rambling about guns. The bottom line: Business is business. The MacHeist bundle is good business. The bundled price is going to encourage people who've never dropped a dollar on shareware ever at any point to drop dollars. One dollar, or even two, recovered for a shareware author is significant versus the zero that often gets spent on their software, often by scofflaw-like long-time piratical users. The bundle also achieves exposure for some of these products that would've been unattainable otherwise. Would I, or anyone I know, ever have spent money on a Pangea game? Nope. Never. iClip? Maybe.. I know others that like it.. but I shy away from user interface altering things like that. For FotoMagico? At $79 normally priced? I would've thought them crazy. Now that I have these things from the bundle? Hooray! Quite cool software. I'm sold on the benefits. I'll be an upgrade customer for at least some of them. The same goes for at least a few other bundle tools. Getting a license for TextMate and Delicious Library on the cheap is an amazing deal.. and now that I'm invested, however tinily at the outset, each of those developers has potentially made a long-term sale that will result in many times the revenue lost on the individual copies in upgrade revenue. Newsfire's author was particularly cognizant of this issue.. the MacHeist license doesn't come with lifetime upgrades.. but for a tiny figure of 10 dollars more, it's an option right out of the gate. Instant revenue turnover. It's a good, good thing. I honestly wish that I -had- subscribed to Gruber's blog in the past, so I could have the pleasure of saying to him: "No, John. No holy wars. No whining. Sit down, shut up, and give me my money back."