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From: strasser@grasp.cis.upenn.edu (Colin Strasser)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Does Shareware hurt professional software development?
Message-ID: <25291@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 26 May 90 16:02:25 GMT
References: <73042@srcsip.UUCP> <1395@lectroid.sw.stratus.com> <136211@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <1990May25.033040.12421@ameristar>
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Reply-To: strasser@grasp.cis.upenn.edu.UUCP (Colin Strasser)
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In article <1990May25.033040.12421@ameristar> rick@ameristar (Rick Spanbauer) writes:
>In article <136211@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> cmcmanis@stpeter.Eng.Sun.COM (Chuck McManis) writes:
>>because they are not comparable quality wise. However, who would
>>buy Lattice or Manx if gcc and gdb were available for "free" and 
>>ran in the same amount of memory, were equally well documented, 
>
>       ...   The Amiga market is fairly hard to turn a buck in no 
>	matter what you're doing and people are just encouraged to take 
>	their development cycles elsewhere when you make their that much 
>	harder.  IMHO.

Sanity check: if Gnu C for the Amiga were as good as Lattice or Manx, then 
why not use it?  Simply because it's not commercial?  I mean, the way the
free market works is that if my product is as good as yours for significantly
less money, then mine will be chosen over yours.  The key is defining "as
good as."  That's not as easy as it seems - in our compiler scenario, per-
haps company product support is important enough to you to justify the cost
of a commercial C compiler, all else being equal.  Or perhaps most develop-
ers will see some feature of the commercial compiler that is not included
in Gnu (special Amiga quirks like chip/fast mem allocation, for instance, or
even just the Amiga Includes).

But if not, then why support the commercial product?  In our economy, competi-
tion breeds improvement.  Why, Lattice and Manx themselves (despite their 
current image as beleagered defenders of quality software) spur one another
to improve their products.

See Rick, what do you or I care if Lattice and Manx take their business else-
where, if we have *as good a product* to replace theirs?  And if it's NOT as
good a product (in enough people's eyes), then the point is moot - Lattice and
Manx won't leave while they have a profitable market.

Please, don't coddle corporations.  They really don't need it.
				-Colin
Colin Strasser				University of Pennsylvania
strasser@eniac.seas.upenn.edu		Moore School of Electrical Engineering
CI$: 72447,1650				Class of '90 -- Penn's 250th year!