Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!bfmny0!tneff
From: tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: Paying for Shareware (Was: Re: v09i070: newsclip 1.1...)
Message-ID: <15191@bfmny0.UU.NET>
Date: 21 Feb 90 20:26:25 GMT
References: <1235@utoday.UUCP> <17923@rpp386.cactus.org> <15166@bfmny0.UU.NET> <34268@watmath.waterloo.edu> <15179@bfmny0.UU.NET> <1268@utoday.UUCP>
Reply-To: tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff)
Lines: 30

In article <1268@utoday.UUCP> greenber@.UUCP (Ross M. Greenberg) writes:
>There are two discussions taking place here.  One is on registering shareware.

There are two kinds of software distributed on Usenet: source
(traditional) and binaries (since the PC/BBS universe broke in).
Shareware source won't work because source is made to be patched, and
once it's patched it's not your work product anymore, it's a joint work
product of the net.  This was a FEATURE NOT A BUG in the original net
milieu.  But it doesn't mix with the shareware concept.

Shareware binaries work exactly as well on the net** as they do on BBS's
and commercial timesharing services -- neither better or worse.  You
fling your handiwork to the winds and sit back and hope for a decent
percentage of registrations.

If you're sensible, you keep on inventing new things and distributing
them, so that your receipts accrue.

If you're more greedy than sensible, you spend your efforts trying to
coax more registrations out of your existing products' users (via
crippling, pleading or legalistic-sounding threats) instead of writing
new stuff.

Or if you're truly hopeless, you spend lots of time on the computer nets
TALKING about all this instead of DOING it.  :-)

------------------
** A separate issue is whether binaries belong in the core groups to
begin with.  We had this flamewar a year or two ago and the pro-binaries
people won, lengthening UUCP sites' "sys" files the world over...