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From: dmb@wam.umd.edu (David M. Baggett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Publishers (Good shareware is bad shareware)
Message-ID: <1991May15.144206.14581@wam.umd.edu>
Date: 15 May 91 14:42:06 GMT
References: <1991May11.211802.22320@wam.umd.edu> <1325@zinn.MV.COM> <1991May14.124316.29136@lsuc.on.ca>
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In article <1991May14.124316.29136@lsuc.on.ca> jimomura@lsuc.on.ca (Jim Omura) writes:
>                                Now the 'lattice' site would have
>the great joy of passing on a product that was probably taking
>money from their sales, and being expect to pay themselves, in
>terms of connections facilities and storage, as well as messages
>assisting people later who use Sozobon C.

Ahhh!  Now that's the key issue, isn't it.  That the net is actully
cooperative anarchy, both in management and in cost-sharing, and that
shareware that is "too good" actually takes money away from "real"
companies.

A similar example of the "shareware that's too good" problem happens
with games.  Suppose Joe Freeware writes a perfect Tetris clone for the
ST, and makes it free or shareware.  Just having the game out there
will hurt the sales of "BigSoft's" licensed, commercial, "official"
version of the game that BigSoft paid oodles of money for the rights to
distribute.  In fact, a free clone that is substantially better than
the "official" version could absolutely kill sales.  I wonder if
BigSoft could then sue the shareware author for loss of sales.  I seem
to remember something like this being discussed in comp.sys.amiga
regarding Tetris and Spectrum Holobyte, but I don't know the details.

In that sense, it seems like you're right in saying that shareware is
not a good idea.  Even shareware products that are compltely original
(and not just clones) may still hurt commercial software, and this is
probably bad for the ST community in general, since reduced
profitability from software sales makes good developers quit.

But unfortunately, the Tetris example above still applies to freeware,
public domain, and public domain-with-souce-code (even more so, in fact).

And we are not alone here. This is something that's possibly going to
happen in the music business too, as more and more people get home
studios capable of producing CD-quality recordings.  What a legal
morass!

Nevertheless, what we DON'T want to see is a bunch of court cases
against unknowing shareware authors.  And we DON'T want zillions of
restrictions on what can be written and distributed by shareware
authors.

The optimal solution would be to encourage shareware authors to sell
their best stuff.  A great shareware program could be SOLD for a small
fee (19.95 or so).  If some authors don't want to spend their lives
doing tech support, then perhaps a new class of "cheap-but-no-tech-support"
software should come about.

I imagine most shareware authors don't realize how they may be
affecting the commerical market.  If they did, they might go to the
trouble of selling their software.

>     What's interesting is that there are so many people who are
>"new" to the Net that this whole argument seems to be new to a lot
>of people.  This is one of the oldest historical arguments on the Net.
>It may surprise many here, but there has *always* been a disagreement
>with posting of binary files, for example, if you don't post the
>source code.  Why?  Well, you are *supposed* to share your material
>with the widest possible number of people on the Net.  Posting a
>binary which can't be ported to other machines was (and in many peoples
>opinion still is) a violation of Nettiquette.  And "those people"
>are for the most part the very people who were the main builders
>of the Net.  What do you think "those people" think when they see
>a file that is Binary, Copyrighted, and *demands* money?

One crucial point you're missing about the current situation in
comp.sys.atari.st is that almost everything is "posted" via FTP now.  I
haven't posted anything to comp.binaries for ages.  So no one can say
that it's costing anyone anything to maintin my shareware files, except
for the generous folks at atari.archive who have made it clear that they
don't mind.

FTP is very different from "the Net" -- do you have the same feelings
about things "posted" via FTP?

Dave Baggett
dmb%wam.umd.edu@uunet.uu.net