You should be paid for your service (programming) not your product (the program) was GP's point.
Alright, so I write some fantastic utility for average Joe users. How do I get paid for programming if I don't get paid for selling the program instead?
Average Joe users won't pay for something that is still vaporware, they aren't interested in paying for training, installation, migration and maintenance in most cases and if they need to, they likely wouldn't want the software since it's too complicated to begin with.
No, but you do have the option of selling support contracts to your clients. Training, installation, migration and maintenance are all areas where an expert would be well received and highly paid for.
Believe it or not, the average Joe consumers just generally aren't interested in purchasing any of that - which happen to be the target base for my software.
Get payed upfront for your work, rather than get paid later for the product of your work. It just put you in line with everybody else.
I don't program for any company. I develop utilities and such on my own.. and those that I don't contribute to the opensource community, I sell to average Joe consumer, since they are the target base for said utilities.
I doubt that consumers will pay me before I code a useful utility.
Of course a minor adjustment of the business model can often seem like an impenetrable barrier
You DON'T rely on copyright laws. You rely on the services you give to others; services that will still be yours to give, even if copyright didn't exist.
Average Joe consumer generally doesn't care for support, consulting. So, I guess that leaves applications that exist in the cloud by your logic.
I don't particulary think that will sell well some how.
Everytime my program gets "cracked" and is distributed via, for example, pirate bay, I see a huge influx of new customers.
One of my older projects was a 15USD video to swf flash converter (I had to reverse engineer some parts of flash to figure out how to do this), had a tonne of nifty features. I was selling it back in 2001 until 2007, it has been used on thousands upon thousands of different websites.
To this day, I only made 12 sales of it, that didn't even cover the webhosting costs.
No, but you have the option of support, customization and integration work.
My target is regular Joe consumers, not companies. There is very little money in doing support for regular consumers. Consumers don't generally pay for customization or integration work once they have the software.
I'm a programmer and I don't rely on copyright laws. I've always been paid to implement specific programs or services that my employer or customer required.
With the utilities I make, that doesn't happen. You're in another target userbase, where your target is business users, not consumers.
In most cases I've seen it's found to be positive, raising awareness of good projects, teaching poor/young people to use heavy hitting tools like 3dsmax, photoshop, Visual Studio and preparing them way better than school for IT jobs.
I find piracy is most damaging in those cases to the software industry. The lack interest in alternative software can be attributed to the fact that pirate software is so readily available which stunts alternative software growth.
Not only that, but it makes it near impossible for 2nd rate software to compete in the markets, since no matter how low they set their prices, they cannot compete against free. This makes it extremely difficult for 2nd rate software to grow and become first rate software. There is no doubt in my mind, if piracy were not possible on the scale it is, that alternative software would be more readily available and more feature complete.
You must be working for Microsoft or a games company or the like. Almost all the programmers I know do not rely on copyright laws. They rely on quality they give the company and whether that is closed or open source is irrelevant to them (or to the company they work for).
You seem to make the assumption that I work for a company.
So if you rely on it, I am sure you use it as an unfair leverage system as well.
Piracy is a concern to those who are self employed programmers, making useful utilities that people pirate rather than pay for. Unfortunately, copyright law works better for larger companies than the individual who is just trying to get by.
Why can Apple package an OS with a browser and not get done for anti competitive behavour?
Because Apple don't have a market dominance they can use to introduce a product to kill another product.
If MS stop packaging IE with windows what would I download firefox with ?
You could do it using the webbrowser provided by your OEM copy of Windows.
Why are we against one monoply and for another ?
I hate Flash, I'm against Flash since it's proprietary.
Why are "the people" backing the closed source solution ?
Who are "the people"? I don't consider myself part of this "the people" group, since I have different opinions to what you suggest.
Moonlight is a great project and it is open source and it has MS as a backer so its going to be around for a while.
Should Microsoft be successful in making a dominant format, they can introduce a new version of the software and provide either no documentation on the new specs or provide extremely bad documentation that leads to nowhere (see the Office Open XML format).
Microsoft have good reasons to do this and it's not in Adobe's interests to eliminate support on those platforms, since they are not selling operating systems - I believe this expresses the opinion of many on Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
And what router brand would you recommend?
Alright, so I write some fantastic utility for average Joe users. How do I get paid for programming if I don't get paid for selling the program instead?
Average Joe users won't pay for something that is still vaporware, they aren't interested in paying for training, installation, migration and maintenance in most cases and if they need to, they likely wouldn't want the software since it's too complicated to begin with.
Believe it or not, the average Joe consumers just generally aren't interested in purchasing any of that - which happen to be the target base for my software.
Average Joe consumer doesn't want "consulting".
I don't program for any company. I develop utilities and such on my own.. and those that I don't contribute to the opensource community, I sell to average Joe consumer, since they are the target base for said utilities.
I doubt that consumers will pay me before I code a useful utility.
I don't see anything minor that I can change.
Average Joe consumer generally doesn't care for support, consulting. So, I guess that leaves applications that exist in the cloud by your logic.
I don't particulary think that will sell well some how.
I don't know? Got some statistics?
I think most people who can program don't have a programming job.
Google makes money off advertising on their search engine.
Average Joe consumer doesn't want "consulting".
I found regular average Joe consumers (who happened to be my target market) don't buy support or training much.
One of my older projects was a 15USD video to swf flash converter (I had to reverse engineer some parts of flash to figure out how to do this), had a tonne of nifty features. I was selling it back in 2001 until 2007, it has been used on thousands upon thousands of different websites.
To this day, I only made 12 sales of it, that didn't even cover the webhosting costs.
My target is regular Joe consumers, not companies. There is very little money in doing support for regular consumers. Consumers don't generally pay for customization or integration work once they have the software.
That wouldn't be very profitable and for self employed, small companies, that can be suicide.
Provided suicide didn't occur from that act.
With the utilities I make, that doesn't happen. You're in another target userbase, where your target is business users, not consumers.
To put it simply, that option is not available to me.
The standard response to this is that OS X is worth it.
Being someone who is platform agnostic and generally uses many platforms, I don't agree.
Doesn't Apple do the same thing?
I find OS X slower since spotlight came in.
Torrents aren't rape. This is the foundation of what the pirate bay is.
There is no spoon.
ROFL. Where have you been? Most good shareware software is cracked and pirated.
I never bought Doom as a kid, the shareware version was enough.
I've always been a Slashdot user, actually.
I find piracy is most damaging in those cases to the software industry. The lack interest in alternative software can be attributed to the fact that pirate software is so readily available which stunts alternative software growth.
Not only that, but it makes it near impossible for 2nd rate software to compete in the markets, since no matter how low they set their prices, they cannot compete against free. This makes it extremely difficult for 2nd rate software to grow and become first rate software. There is no doubt in my mind, if piracy were not possible on the scale it is, that alternative software would be more readily available and more feature complete.
You seem to make the assumption that I work for a company.
Piracy is a concern to those who are self employed programmers, making useful utilities that people pirate rather than pay for. Unfortunately, copyright law works better for larger companies than the individual who is just trying to get by.
Mono already has a Windows version. I haven't checked on Moonlight though.
Because Apple don't have a market dominance they can use to introduce a product to kill another product.
You could do it using the webbrowser provided by your OEM copy of Windows.
I hate Flash, I'm against Flash since it's proprietary.
Who are "the people"? I don't consider myself part of this "the people" group, since I have different opinions to what you suggest.
Should Microsoft be successful in making a dominant format, they can introduce a new version of the software and provide either no documentation on the new specs or provide extremely bad documentation that leads to nowhere (see the Office Open XML format).
Microsoft have good reasons to do this and it's not in Adobe's interests to eliminate support on those platforms, since they are not selling operating systems - I believe this expresses the opinion of many on Slashdot.
I can't find any rape or pillaging! :(