Re: 30 days trial immune to set clock back in time?
On Sep 21, 12:22 am, reckonin...@gmail.com wrote:
On Sep 20, 5:56 pm, Roedy Green <see_webs...@mindprod.com.invalid>
wrote:
On Fri, 19 Sep 2008 14:21:20 -0700 (PDT), bbo...@gmail.com wrote,
quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said :
I recommend finding a business model that does not depend on
artificial scarcity.
There is no scarcity, just insisting that people pay their fair share.
Ridiculous. He's insisting that he should get paid over and over again
for doing a piece of work just once, unlike say a stonemason who has
to lay more bricks to make more money. Furthermore, he's attempting to
destroy other peoples' property, namely, their copies of the software
he authored.
The alternative is that the first customer for a piece of software be
asked to pay for its *entire* development and subsequent customers be
licensed for free, or that all software be locked away as services.
In such a market, *no* software would be licensed to most users; the
only software available without a negotiated contract or a service
agreement would be the minimum necessary to access services that can
be provisioned without exposing the implementation to the world (say,
a web browser and a minimal OS). Imagine a world in which you had to
pay a recurring service fee to use Word, or to play Solitaire; that is
the logical conclusion of your line of reasoning, and it's one some of
the more astute software companies are already pursuing under the
banner of "Software as a Service".
Can you afford to pay for the development of Excel or Photoshop by
yourself? Having done so, would you be content to see Adobe giving
Photoshop away to everyone else, including your competition? Each of
the programs I've named cost millions of dollars to develop, and even
something as trivial as Winzip or Trillian involves a fairly chunky
number of man-hours to build, market, and support. All of that costs
money. By charging each customer a smaller amount for their license,
the total development cost is amortized across all customers and comes
down to a reasonable price for each license.
Relying on open-source communities to drive for-pay software out of
business is a pipe dream, because the kind of applications people pay
money for - word processors, video games, design and editing tools,
contact managers - are either uninteresting problems (word processing)
or require skills that are not readily available for free (video
games, for example, require visual design skills of a level that is
not normally available without paying a considerable amount of money
for). The places where FOSS have traditionally excelled have been
back-end tools and servers, from Samba to BIND, not desktop
applications.
Remember, the OP is only trying to charge *once* for each license to
whatever product he spent time (and thus money) creating. That he
wants to allow potential customers to try his product out before
spending money licensing it is an additional service he is not
ethically or morally obliged to offer. It is, however, good
marketing. If he can't find a way to do that, then he'll be left with
no choice but to charge *before* allowing anyone to use it at all, or
to release it for free and give up on seeing financial return on his
time spent - and given that he's trying to charge money, "fame and
recognition" are not likely to keep him in the software industry in
the absence of money.
(Your assertion elsewhere in this thread that you are entitled to do
anything you like with information in your possession, including the
bit patterns on a disk comprising a piece of software, is not
supported by the laws of the country you post from. See act C-42, the
Canadian Copyright Act, wherein the rights holder is granted: the
exclusive right of reproduction, the right to rent the work, the right
to restrain others from renting the work and the right to assign or
license the copyright to others. It has force of law, as well as
precedent that it applies to software. See as well acts C-60 and C-61,
which were tabled during the last cabinet session and will likely be
re-tabled after the election and which update C-42 to tighten, not
loosen, copyright restrictions on software and to clarify the role of
EULAs. All Berne Convention signatories and WIPO members have similar
laws.)
Of course, none of this has any relevance to you - as far as I can
tell, you have released no software, either commercially or for free.
You have, however, made numerous demands of others who *have* released
software, with no offer of compensation for the time to be spent
satisfying them. You appear to want everything and to pay for
nothing, which means you are not a customer - you are a parasite.
-o