Leslie Newell <lesnew...@fmail.co.uk> wrote: > 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. ...
On the one hand, I agree with Duncan that copy protection is an anti-feature from the point of view of the individual user. Mostly, the copy protections work okay, but it's not unusual for them to fail. In many cases it's because, by the nature of what it has to do, copy protection has to include the most obscure possible code (so it can't be cracked) to disable normal features of the machine (copying files) in ways that are hard to figure out or defeat. The techniques for doing that are riskier for the user than normal techniques, and have some probability of also defeating very reasonable uses, like backups. I've run into serious bugs in copy protection, one of which cost me six hours on the phone with Microsoft to get my Windows machine running after XP decided that I had committed an act of piracy by changing my WiFi card. Now, having said that, I still have to agree with Leslie that, horrible as it is, and much as I hate it, copy protection is necessary for many software authors. If I remember the numbers correctly, only a tiny percentage of users ever pay for "shareware". If you distribute a million copies of your program, and 10,000 users each pay you $50 for the program you spent 5,000 hours developing, you are okay. But if you are only able to distribute 10,000 copies, and 100 users pay you $50, you've made a dollar an hour for your labor, and that doesn't cut it. If the users had to pay because there is no way to get the program for free by copying it from someone else, you can afford to create a program that 10,000 users need. As Leslie said, this is good for the users. My feeling about copy protected software is this: If you don't want the copy protection, don't buy the software. No one is forcing you to buy it. In my own case, I will generally choose a worse, maybe a much worse, copyable and open source program over a copy protected one. Many others feel the way I do and many copy protection schemes fail because they drive away buyers. But, as long as the author is not making secret attacks on your system like the Sony rootkit, the software does belong to the author and he has a right to sell it with copy protection if he wishes. I agree with Duncan on many of his excellent points. But I don't think anyone abridges anyone else's freedom by writing software and offering it for sale under closed source and a copy protection scheme. Now as for the discussion of religion - I'd be happy to jump into that (have I done that already :^) I love to discuss religion (I'm mostly against it) and I never get offended by people who disagree with me about it. But I will restrain myself in the interest of not boring everyone. -- Alan Meyer amey...@yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users