I'm jumping into this one a bit late and I am undoubtedly going to get flamed for this but I think there is a place for closed source and licensing. I am a programmer and I make a living from the programs I sell. Most of my programs sell to a niche market, probably 70% of whom are hobbyists. I do use a license key system to try to reduce copying. Of my total work load, probably 10% is support work, all freely provided. Companies that make money selling support services for open source software rely on their supported software being available in huge volume. Although only a very small percentage of users are willing to pay for support, there are enough to keep these companies going. There is no way I could make a living out of just selling support services as there are simply not enough potential customers for my software. To put it bluntly, if I made the source code freely available I would go out of business in a very short time.
I personally don't like copy protection systems but they are a necessary evil. When you purchase a software license you are purchasing a license to use that software, not the software itself. It is the same as if you rent a car. You are purchasing the right to use the car for an agreed period. You are not purchasing the car itself. If you were to sell that car or give it away you would be breaking the law. Copy protection, while it is almost universally disliked, is simply a means of enforcing the license agreement. My system does not lock the program to a specific computer and it is for life. I do not charge for updates. IMHO charging between 60% and 100% of the package price for updates is wrong. Let me reply to some of the recent statements:
1) Activation is an anti-feature, period. That is, it does NOTHING good for the purchaser of the software, while having all /sorts/ of risks in terms of breaking things.
As I described above, I have no choice. If I did not control my software I would go out of business. Therefore it does have a benefit for the end user. If it did not exist I would not be able to sell my software and therefore the software would not be available. I have a large number of very happy users who are willing to pay for my programs.
Writing non-free software is not an ethically legitimate activity, so if people who do this run into trouble, that's good! All businesses based on non-free software ought to fail, and the sooner the better.
Huh? Is it then morally acceptable to directly copy a best selling author's book and sell it yourself? How about some clever gizmo that has cost millions to develop. Is it morally acceptable to directly copy that item and sell it yourself without paying any royalties? Why should software be any different? Should we simply scrap all copyright and patent laws because they are not 'ethically legitimate'? As a closed source software vendor it is in my interest to keep my customers as happy as possible. My sales rely on my good reputation. That means I have to fix bugs quickly and add new features as they are requested. Open source authors don't have that impetus. I use both Windows and Linux. My Windows installations mostly work. If I try a piece of software and it doesn't work I don't buy it. Now take my home computer running Kubuntu 9.10. A lot of the applications that come with it have annoying bugs or in several cases complete show stoppers. KDE bombs on a regular basis. Ark us unusable. Archive mounter doesn't. It took me pretty much a whole day and two different Firewire cards to get my Firewire video camera to talk. The only package I could get to work with it was Kdenlive and it has a number of irritating bugs. I am not saying all open source software is rubbish. I regularly use and contribute towards several OS packages. When I first started looking for a good binary newsreader I found Pan suited me best of all the free and commercial packages I tried. I am not saying Windows is perfect either. For instance I know of at least one way to crash Windows Explorer on XP. I do not personally agree with Microsoft's business methods and IMHO Windows had been steadily going downhill since W2K. There are plenty of software vendors out there who do push the limits of what is acceptable but I am afraid the same can be said for any market. Les _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
