Re: Protecting Software w/ Software License Keys...
Re: Protecting Software w/ Software License Keys...
- Subject: Re: Protecting Software w/ Software License Keys...
- From: "Jeffrey T. Hazelwood" <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2002 02:46:07 -0400
The thing about good freeware is the part about making money, which is
why I don't like good freeware. (crappy freeware is ok because it
doesn't hurt anyone's bottom line)
If you can write good shareware apps, you won't need to look for a job.
You could sit at home in your underwear and develop more apps and get
paid to do it.
Good freeware sucks because you kill the guy trying to make a buck. Look
what ms did to netscape with the free browser.
I think small freeware apps that are useful, but people might not
necessarily pay for, are fine.
But, why would you waste many hours of effort on something and then just
give it away? I don't understand why people do this. If no companies
made any money, no one would have jobs and their
kids would starve.
Good freeware is like someone coming into your company one day with your
same skillset & talent and saying, "Hey, I'll take that guy's place and
work for free!"
On Sunday, June 16, 2002, at 01:51 AM, Richard Schreyer wrote:
I've got some questions not about the technical side of licensing
shareware, but rather how to get users to pay...
So far, I've only written (fairly successful) freeware, because it
really doesn't obligate me to continue any work in the future, and I
like that freedom. But because the Software Engineering intern market
is so tight this year, I wasn't able to find any meaningful
employment. I've been doing Cocoa for a couple of years, but not many
are hiring interns for Cocoa programming ;) Of course, even finding a
C/C++/Java internship has been hard.
I really don't want to sit on my ass for a summer, and have been
considering putting together a project that I've been planning for some
time. The options for licensing are pretty much Freeware vs.
Shareware. Free is cool, since I can drop it if I want/need to,
shareware would be cool too, since Income is obviously a good thing.
Us college students need ramen money. Since this is going to be a
small cheap app, if it goes shareware I'm not really concerned stopping
the crackers, just casual users who may try to grab a serial number
online.
There have been several articles written recently, (Ambrosia's in
particular comes to mind) about getting users to pay for Shareware,
which pretty much stated that their evidence says giving users a fully
functional version and asking them to pay eventually simply doesn't
work, even in the case of quality software. Personally, I despise
nagware, and it's always the first thing I throw away, so making the
user wait 10 seconds every time they start the app is out. Timeboms
suck too, since it often keeps users from trying out future versions of
your app, after they decided they didn't like a previous version (this
has bitten me personally several times too.)
The only real middleground is to have some advanced features disabled
(but nothing central to using the program, the quicker it becomes a
part of the way they use their mac, the better), with low-scale
nagging. Something along the lines of OmniWeb, although I think they
went a little light...
Can anyone provide any feedback on what kind of unregistered
limitations/nagging they found that worked well to encourage the user
to buy without pissing them off?
And for those of you out there who have released shareware in the
$15-20 price range, anyone willing to share roughly how many copies
they've sold? I have absolutely *no* idea how large the market is
right now.
I know it's a long post, but thanks for reading this far (:
Richard Schreyer
On Saturday, June 15, 2002, at 09:59 PM, Jeff LaMarche wrote:
Personally, I give away everything I write that's not work related
(i.e. anything
I write for the Mac) because I do it for fun and to grow as a
developer and
because I don't have the ability to take on any support obligations. I
just
released an open-source cocoa framework (well quasi-framework, I
haven't packaged
it as a framework yet) and application for generating barcodes that
provides
all the functionality of programs I've seen selling for hundreds of
dollars.
That's not a very effective strategy for those of you looking to
pay bills
and put food on the table from writing Mac software, though =).
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