Hi Josh, Well said. I don't think I could have stated that any better than you already have.
As you pointed out the world is made up of infinite shades of gray, and extremes of any kind are always bad for the end user. I've experienced this often enough in my own life to know this to be true. The problem is that people who see things in shades of black and white can not see the errors in their own thinking. Anyway, when it comes to the issue of piracy I definitely don't think people pirate software simply out of some philosophical reason. There are more often as not some circumstantial reasons for the piracy that may even seem justified once they are known. Those reasons may not be justifiable from an ethics point of view, but certainly are justifiable from the pirates viewpoint. It would be in our best interests as developers to discover those reasons and see what if anything we can do about addressing them.. Cheers! On 4/24/13, Draconis <i...@dracoent.com> wrote: > Dark, > > It actually is very much related to games, as we were talking about the > reasons for audio game piracy. In your eagerness to offer philosophical > talking points, you entirely missed the point I was making. Hence why I > referenced Android as well. > > The days of small and individual developers creating and designing games and > apps is returning with a vengeance, not *just* on Apple platforms, but on > others as well. > > Distribution has never been free. This is simply ignorance. Before the > Internet, one needed to produce physical discs, be that floppies or optical > discs, to sell games. Later, the Internet came along, and one must purchase > server space and bandwidth to host titles for download, pay for credit card > transaction services, and so on. These things are neither free, nor cheap. > > The overhead is actually more expensive for us to offer Windows titles that > Mac or iOS ones with Apple's fee. > > Plenty of non-profit organizations are just as bad or worse than > corporations, so that does not solve the problem either. > > And, not all corporations are evil. The world is not made up of black and > white. It is rendered in infinite shades of gray. > > I do think you need to, whether you agree with them or not, become more > educated on Apple's models if you're going to try to debate the merits of > them. Apple does not exercise a "complete control" model, as you put it. > This is a common misconception usually banded about by folks in Microsoft's > or Android/Linux camps, and is based on a number of falsehoods and/or > exaggerations. > > Apple is a huge contributor to open source, for instance. Both webkit and > the Darwin projects were spearheaded by Apple, and indeed, many of Apple's > competitors freely use webkit in competing products. > > The Mac is not locked down in the way that iOS is. Android is swamped with > malware because of the open model it employs with virtually no oversight. > You couldn't pay me enough to use an Android phone, even if I wasn't an > Apple user, because of the numbers of malware infested apps in their > official marketplace. Extremes are bad. All open is bad…all closed is bad. > Apple has found a sweet spot that works well, in my opinion. > > As I said above, there are infinite shades of gray, and some very good > reasons why Apple does things the way they do that benefit the users > directly. There are some decisions that Apple has made that I do not agree > with, too, but I am able to weigh out these various pros and cons > individually and determine if the pros still outweigh the cons. They do. > Just as I don't hate everything Microsoft does, either, though I do not use > their products on a day-to-day basis. > > Ultimately, the main point is whether or not blind gamers are pirating games > because of philosophical reasons, as you assert. I think that idea is > ridiculous. I understand that you have some strongly held philosophical > beliefs of your own, and that's fine…but they do not apply to this > situation. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
