Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!van-bc!
From: lphillips@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca (Larry Phillips)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Does Shareware hurt professional software development?
Message-ID: <1640@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca>
Date: 26 May 90 21:08:22 GMT
Lines: 44
Return-Path: <lpami!lphillips>
To: van-bc!rnews

In <24937@usc.edu>, papa@pollux.usc.edu (Marco Papa) writes:
>
>IMHO, shareware, freeware or copyless software like the FSF stuff is good.
>And when I say good I meand for end-users.  
>
> [stuff deleted...]
>
>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.

A very healthy attitude Marco, and a far cry from the whining I used to hear
from the folks at MSS when they were telling me that Aterm was destroying their
market.  Never mind that Online!  was buggy as hell.  Never mind that it hogged
system resources. Never mind that Aterm was (and continues to be) a relatively
vanilla terminal program. I could not convince anyone from MSS that their
product was its own worst enemy, that their priorities were all wrong ("We have
only had two requests to make XModem work, so we won't be doing that."). No,
they hated my guts for telling people about the bugs in Online!, and for
recommending Aterm, and whined about it constantly. They even asked me to stop
working on it (though I was only one of many who were improving it), so that
their piece of garbage  would sell better. I asked them how long I was supposed
to wait. I asked them to look at Aterm to see what a minimal terminal program
should do, and in fact invited them to look at the source code.

I spit on attitudes like that, and I'm glad to see that you feel you can
compete without snivelling about unfair competition, and that the freeware and
shareware acts as an incemtive for improving your product.

This is How It Should Be.

-larry

--
The raytracer of justice recurses slowly, but it renders exceedingly fine.
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|   //   Larry Phillips                                                 |
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