🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <badger.826246592@phylo.life.uiuc.edu>,
Jonathan Badger <badger@phylo.life.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>
>>>>>>> "Sanjay" == Sanjay S Vakil <sanj@athena.mit.edu> writes:
>
>>Sanjay> I don't understand why people feel that
>>Sanjay> crippleware/timeoutware is such a crime.  Sure, it's less
>>Sanjay> ideal than 'true' shareware, but the market has expanded way
>>Sanjay> beyond people you can 'trust' to send in shareware fees.  For
>>Sanjay> example, I'm *sure* that there are more than 24 people out
>>Sanjay> there enjoying Mahjongg, but the registrations have pretty
>>Sanjay> much halted.  This is a powerful push towards crippling my
>>Sanjay> next release.
>>Sanjay> sanj
>
>The real question is *why* people insist on writing
>shareware. Shareware is a blight upon humanity -- by definition,

By definition?  Nonsense.  At least, I have not seen any such definition 
in any ANSI/ISO spec that I have ever read.  Nor in any Unix 
documentation, Mac toolbox books, Windows documentation, etc.

My own definition, unless other information changes it is that freeware 
is not free, merely something that someone else has funded the 
development of.  Often, that someone is a federal agency or 
grant-supported university spending (conceptually) my tax and pledge dollars.

>shareware authors are amateur programers who program for fun, and not
>to put food on their table.

Incorrect.  Peter Lewis supports himself entirely on shareware.  Several 
other people I know use shareware to pay for deveopment environments that 
they could not otherwise afford.  Further, many of these people are pro 
class, but are rather careful about license agreements.  (Work owns a 
copy of CodeWarrior, but I cannot use it for personal projects without 
the project becoming the property of my employer, and something whose 
development I have to justify against a budget even if I do it on my own 
time.)

> Why not be a freeware programmer instead?

Because then you get no return from your investment.

>You have already discovered that shareware isn't very profitable -- at
>least in writing freeware you get a warm fuzzy feeling of helping
>society.

That is a benefit, and one not to be sneered at.  On the other hand, most 
of the people writing shareware are writing and distributing it this way 
in order to reduce the program cost and price.  This way, they get a 
reasonable amount of return, and the custmer can insure that it actually 
works.  This is a far better deal than most commercialware offers.

>  In the UNIX world shareware is basically non-existant and
>freeware is plentiful -- gcc, emacs, TeX, the X Window System, hell,
>even whole UNIX-compatible operating systems such as Linux and FreeBSD
>are freeware. Why not write freeware yourself? Are you really saying
>that your Mahjongg program was harder to write than emacs? If not, why
>do you demand money for it while no money is required for emacs?

Hmmm.  Ever looked at just where the money came from to develop BSD Unix 
originally, or Emacs, or X, or a number of other useful packages 
available on Unix?  Let me give you a hint - the US government, various 
tuition payments, and the endowments of certain major universities.  (And 
other govenrmental bodies as well in other countries - I am merely only 
familiar with early BSD and Mach history.)

One can argue that many of the students are working on these on 
thier own time, but many of those students are working on thier 
own time on 20k pieces of hardware.  (Faculty and staff often get 
salaries or other grants that will partly defray development costs - I 
assume this is sufficient to count as support for development?)  Further, 
most university unix machines are maintained by a paid staff.

As I recall, various members of the FSF are working on thier own out of 
thier personal fortunes, while others are working from aformentioned 
grants and subsidies.  Makes it hard to tell just who is funding what 
nowadays.

I did not include Linux in the above list, as I had heard rumors that the 
original author did it entirely on his own time on persoanl equipment, so 
there is one tremendous counter example to the principle that freeware is 
rarely free.  I have not been able to confirm this.

Even many of these freeware packages that are now done purely out of fun 
by people on personal equipment have a legacy of earlier development which 
was quite well funded.  As the designs and code matures, the early 
funding will matter less, but until it is at the level of an antirely new 
design and implementation, it is not "free", merely not paid for by the 
users.

Thus, sneering at shareware authors for asking to be paid is often rather 
disingenuous.  I rarely acquire shareware now, as I have found 
commercialware usually has better support, but there are some amazing 
exceptions.  Hardy Macia has produced shareware that beats commercial 
products in similar markets, so I own one of his packages, and am 
considering a couple of others.  Ben Gottlieb has written some things 
that may turn out to be useful in the next few months, and I will see 
what he has then.  Borland, on the other hand, asks you to pay rather 
dearly for the privledge of reporting the bugs in ther C++ compilers.

As far as the crippleware goes, I will foten install a number of 
packages, and then not have time to play with them before they expire.  I 
feel no rancor, but I usually do not buy the product if it did not 
demonstrate its worth to me in whatever time I ended up having to use it 
in.  I did recently purchase QC, a bug finder, that has such a demo 
version, after trying it once before on hearing that they had a new 
version.  This seemed to justify getting a new demo serial number, and 
this time, it demonstrated its worth.  Crippleware and timeware are not 
always a bar to payment, but they can be.

Scott
--
Scott Ellsworth          fuz@deltanet.com
"When a great many people are unable to find work, unemployment 
results" - Calvin Coolidge, (Stanley Walker, City Editor, p. 131 (1934))
"The barbarian is thwarted at the moat." - Scott Adams