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From: dillon@CORY.BERKELEY.EDU (Matt Dillon)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Having a picture in the background of one's workbench...
Message-ID: <8710200513.AA21101@cory.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Tue, 20-Oct-87 01:13:47 EDT
Article-I.D.: cory.8710200513.AA21101
Posted: Tue Oct 20 01:13:47 1987
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	Yah! That's telling them! 

:KEVIN MCBRIDE WRITES:
:I don't see anything inherently *wrong* about the shareware *concept*
:either.  My major objection is people asking for money for software that
:is too easy, trivial, broken, or just plain stinks.  Then I look at
:people like Leo and Dave Wecker and Matt and Mike and Bryce and others
;too numerous to mention, who give us wonderfully fun hacks, excellent
:terminal emulators, text editors, shells, tech info, etc. the list goes
:on and on and...
:
:THEY GIVE US THESE THINGS FREELY!  THAT'S RIGHT!  THEY DON'T ASK FOR A
:DIME FOR THESE THINGS.

	I take an even more outright view of shareware.... I'm against it.
Oh, the *concept* is ok, but the way people have implemented it is 
deplorable (and I'm talking 98% of the shareware software, where the remaining
2% 'correct' implementations were done by the people who founded the concept,
and a very few others).

	Frankly, and in my opinion, freely flowing information is a basic 
requirement to act as a shadow backbone ensuring, amount other things, that 
commercial items maintain the highest quality in software engineering.
I.E. they may not figure us into their calculations but we are a major force 
in pushing the machine and its software forward.  One can think of shareware
as disrupting this backbone.

	Of all the countless packages out there designated 'shareware', only
a couple dozen (educated guess) make a non-trivial amount of money.  Of the
remaining 99.9999BAR %, none make enough to dent the bills of your everyday
college student much less the paycheck of a working one.  I don't know about
all of you, but my job pays more in a day than all the money I'd expect to 
earn from a 'shareware' product, if I had any. 

	Besides, I *like* giving away software and knowlege!  Every time I 
come up with something, Bryce asks me if I'm going to try selling it, and I
always say "well, maybe".  I have yet to sell anything...

>I can sympathize with college students trying to make a few extra bucks.
>Shareware aint the way to do it.  You could make more money flipping
>burgers at McDigital's Fast Feed Through.

	Yup.  Don't you love philosophical arguments?

BTW Can somebody at C-A provide me with information on the ACTION_INFO packet,
in respect to both the ACTION_INFO and ACTION_DISK_INFO packets....?? To
avoid confusion, how bout the specs on both!  I really want to release my
sample DOS device driver to the net, but don't want to release one that is
incomplete!

						-Matt