Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!uw-beaver!cornell!batcomputer!saunders From: saunders@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Kevin Saunders) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: Think of it as NeXT evangelism Message-ID: <1990Nov9.210806.11591@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> Date: 9 Nov 90 21:08:06 GMT References: <10397@ubc-cs.UUCP> <1009@toaster.SFSU.EDU> Organization: Cornell Theory Center Lines: 41 In article <1009@toaster.SFSU.EDU> eps@cs.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott) writes: >I think shareware is a great concept, but in practice it's failed. > >What went wrong? What went >wrong was that most shareware promoters saw it as a way to make a >quick buck, with callous disregard for their market. Oh, ick. What went wrong with shareware is that 1) magazines are loath to provide publicize programs when they won't receive ad revenues from them and 2) the percentage of people honest enough to pay for the shareware they use is TINY. If users feel they're entitled to steal Excel and 1-2-3, they're gonna steal shareware without a second thought. I made $100 off dumb virtue, my shareware vt100/tek4010/text-editor on the Mac, all from *Europeans*. I never broadcast a truly debugged version (except to those who sent the $25) because I figured it out: if nobody sent in money for FEdit, a really useful, reliable Mac hex file editor, which got plenty of press, for sure nobody was gonna do it for my weird-UNIX-oriented terminal program, even if it *did* do a reasonable ANSI X3.64/vt100 emulation as fast as is possible when using QuickDraw (unlike, say, Red Ryder, vom-vom) and support uw and do wild things like support proportional fonts. Was/is dumb virtue reliable? Well, I used it as my primary Mac programming editor (dv did/does finds, text shifts, bracket matching, etc.) until I started using MPW... (a dog, but it handles files > 32K unlike dumb virtue's TextEdit based editor--oh, Apple sucks the long one! 6 years, and they *still* don't support text >32K! Anybody out there remember CoreEdit? Hahahahah....). Remind me--I gotta stop programming Macs. My resume's getting posted in misc.jobs.resumes. My brain hurts, kevin -- Kevin Eric Saunders cqu@cornellc.cit.cornell.edu