To: mark spider
I disagree with your statement that making the price of JFW
quote more reasonable end-quote would reduce piracy.
Someone who will steal $795 will also steal $495 or $395.
I'm not accusing you of being a pirate but what you wrote
is exactly what the software pirates say when they try to
justify their thefts with whiney excuses.
The way to legitimately reduce the price of software is
to increase the sales so that development costs are
spread over a wider base. And I don't mean by taking
sales away from other speech programs.
So if the goal is a lower-priced JFW, let's work towards
that goal. Let's spread the word in the blind community
and among the sighted family members of blind persons, and
among the charitable organizations that would fund purchases,
and among employers who employ blind people, and among
employers who would employ blind people if they only knew
about JFW and Omni 1000. (The blind guy who turned me on to
speech products is the most computer savvy person in his office
of sighted people, and even his employer's NATIONAL help desk
calls him for advice.)
So do some public relations. Spread your knowledge. If you
know how to install JFW and train someone in its use, call
your state's blind school and offer your service. Call your
local Lion's organization and offer them your services. Charge
for your time, or just volunteer, but just do it.
There are tens of thousands of blind people, maybe more,
who could use a computer and whose family could afford a
computer or who would qualify for charitable
(or government) assistance. Yet those people are going
without a computer because they either don't know what's
available, or they don't know where to go to buy an
integrated system, or they don't know where to go for
funding. Average computer stores don't know anything about
speech products, and there are darn few companies that
specialize in serving the blind, and even fewer that really
know what they are doing.
A Kurzweil reading machine used to cost twenty thousand
dollars, then ten thousand. Now you can get a fully functional
Windows 98 computer with all the standard features, plus HP scanner,
Kurzweil's Omni 1000, Jaws for Windows, a computer desk, and
have money left over to hire someone to put it together and
train you for about five thousand dollars. Maybe more, maybe
less depending on what you want.
So spread the word, volunteer, or whatever. Be part of
the solution.
At 08:36 PM 1/7/1999 PST, you wrote:
>If they made the price more reasonible then this wouldnt happen.
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Visit the jfw ml web page: http://yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au/~nallan/jfw
