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From: papa@pollux.usc.edu (Marco Papa)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Does Shareware hurt professional software development?
Message-ID: <24937@usc.edu>
Date: 27 May 90 08:07:31 GMT
References: <1990May25.033040.12421@ameristar> <25291@netnews.upenn.edu> <1990May26.223843.19350@ameristar>
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I have to say that on this one I personally don't see it the same way as Rick,
though I can understand his arguments.

IMHO, shareware, freeware or copyless software like the FSF stuff is good.
And when I say good I meand for end-users.  

Take for example emacs and C on UNIX. FSF had GCC and Gnu-C++ running on
practically every platform.  Not only that, these compilers have been rated 
BETTER than the other major C compilers by both the leading UNIX magazines
(UNIX World and UNIX Review).  Has this hurt the "commercials"? You bet.
What other side effect did it have?  That the commercials are continuously
improving their products to match GCC features.  Of course these companies
provide support, and that is what a given type of customers require.

Has Gnu-Emacs impacted the sales of Unipress Emacs?  You bet that too. But
then, that's life.  I like better Gnu-Emacs and I'm happy I have the choice.

Similarly has TeX impacted sales of scribe? Sure. The USC CS dept. dropped
Scribe completely when Unilogic continued to give out only licenses with
time bombs.  They deserved it.

Similarly have shareware and freeware sales of Amiga comm programs impacted
A-Talk III sales? They have somewhat, but we've been hard at work at always
being one step ahead (first with a tek emulator, first with Zmodem support,
first with multi-serial, etc..). That is, users have benefitted from the
competition between commercial and freeware/shareware, since we have had to
continuously update the program with new features.  I doubt I would have
continued to do that if the rest of the software competition was lousy.

In terms of sales though, freeware/shareware has not really impacted us
as much as low-priced commercial software such as Baud Bandit. And it
doesn't matter that Baud Bandit has a horrid manual. It is still
commercial software that is on dealer's shelves, unlike freeware/shareware.
We found from interwiews that most people that use freeware/shareware wouldn't
have considered buying a commercial product anyway. On the other hand, there 
are a lot of people that wouldn't consider using software that doesn't come in
a package with a manual and a "promise" of support.

One thing that I'd like to tell people is that they should forget shareware
if their purpose is making ANY money. Shareware doesn't pay and this is even 
more true for a small market like the Amiga.  The only two Shareware flukes
(PC-File and PC-WRITE) have been in the PC Market in the mid-eighties and
they've never been emulated since.  People just don't want to pay for 
things they know they can "keep" for free.

-- Marco
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