Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!jarthur!uunet!mcsun!cernvax!chx400!iam!salvis
From: salvis@iam.unibe.ch (Hans Salvisberg)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: Paying for Shareware
Message-ID: <1990Feb23.155338.28418@iam.unibe.ch>
Date: 23 Feb 90 15:53:38 GMT
References: <1990Feb17.135833.13612@iam.unibe.ch> <14231@s.ms.uky.edu>
Organization: University of Berne, Dept. of Computer Science
Lines: 38

In article <14231@s.ms.uky.edu> sean@ms.uky.edu (Sean Casey) writes:
 
>salvis@iam.unibe.ch (Hans Salvisberg) writes:
>
>|>You know, if you asked nice, I'd probably have removed it from the disk.
>|
>|You know, this is not really the question. If a software is on your disk
>|and you're using it routinely for certain tasks, then that software
>|provides some service to you, and it is only fair that you pay the
>|author for that service.
>
>But my response *is* relevant, because this is not a cut and dried issue.
>What is "fair" seems to be largely a matter of opinion. One can't assume
>that fair in this instance is an empirical truth.
 
Sean, you are deliberately misquoting me by only quoting half of what
I wrote! The other half is:
 
|If you could just as well remove it from your disk, you are obviously not
|using it regularly, and in fact it is only taking up space on your disk
|without giving you any benefit. In that case no shareware author will
|ask you to pay for it.
|
|That's the beauty of shareware!
 
So I agree with you that your response is indeed relevant. If your response
is to delete the software, nobody wants you to pay for it. But throughout
this discussion everyone on the shareware side implicitely assumes that
there may be a piece of shareware that might actually be valuable to you,
so that you'd rather pay the registration fee than delete it from your
disk, if you were forced to choose between these two alternatives. And
the whole point is that given you are using such a piece of shareware,
it would be fair to pay the registration fee, even if you are not forced
to.
 
Hans Salvisberg
 
salvis@ahorn.iam.unibe.ch