Re: [Pan-users] Re: OT: freedomware vs... Was: Building Pan on Windows?

[Leslie Newell]

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