Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!yale!mintaka!dcw From: dcw@lcs.mit.edu (David C. Whitney) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2 Subject: Re: Shareware Message-ID: <1991Jan13.153544.12059@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu> Date: 13 Jan 91 15:35:44 GMT References: Sender: daemon@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu (Lucifer Maleficius) Organization: MIT Spoken Language Systems Group Lines: 31 In article llee@gnh-starport.cts.com (Larry Lee) writes: >=I= pay for shareware. Glad to hear it. You're in the minority. >I'm sure that the number of people out there who pay for shareware number more >than one. Yeah, they number about ten. Or a hundred. For example, Z-Link has been on the shareware market since the end of 87 (I started it in mid-86). Once I posted it, it made its way onto hundreds of bulletin boards around the WORLD. It got its way onto GEnie, and approximately 4 months after I had first released it, at least 100 people had downloaded it from GEnie. NOT ONE GEnie PERSON PAID FOR IT (actually, 2 did, but they were interent customers who happen to have GEnie accounts too). In fact, I have record of 125 people owning it at all. Of those 125, 65 or 70 people paid anything at all, ($1 or $2 for return postage) and about 50 paid the $25 fee I ask for. That's pathetic. It's because of this miserable return on my investment in time and money that further development of Z-Link has all but stopped completely. Now, I tell people, you wanna make a couple of bucks? Write a neato program and distribute it as shareware. You wanna make a living? Get a real job. -- Dave Whitney Computer Science MIT 1990 | I wrote Z-Link and BinSCII. Send me bug dcw@lcs.mit.edu dcw@mit.edu | reports. I still need a job. Send me offers. "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" --Binky (aka Matt Groening)