On Monday, October 14, 2002, at 11:26 AM, Gregory Cranz wrote: > On Friday, October 11, 2002, at 07:48 AM, Ask Solem Hoel wrote: >> >> [...] know I can pay for it in shareware >> but never /ever/ will I pay for shareware. Shareware sucks, and there >> is >> too much of it in the Mac world. That is why we need to re-create every >> useful shareware application as free software and kill those egomaniac >> shareware authors. >> > > Egomaniacs? This is SERIOUS flame-bait on a software developer's list.
Time to jump in here with my own two cents. I don't think Gregory is referring to folks like Unsanity or Stick, whose products represent a serious amount of work at a rock-bottom price. That's shareware done well. There is another side to shareware, though. I'm referring to authors who take advantage of the fact that many Mac users won't touch Terminal.app with a ten-foot pole. They spend fifteen minutes with Apple's dev tools knocking together a half-assed GUI interface that does nothing but sit on top of a command-line tool and/or fiddle with the defaults database. Then, they release their "work" while implying that their program offers some great new capabilities that OS X didn't have, and they have the gall to demand $10, $20, or even $50 for it. > Tsk tsk, Shame on you. People deserve to EAT. People who make an honest effort to create something worth paying for deserve to eat. People who take advantage of others, demanding outrageous compensation for trivial work while deceiving people as to the amount of work they've truly done, deserve nothing but a jail sentence. They're frauds, and should be treated as such. I don't understand this knee-jerk defense of shareware. Just as in any given group of people, there are those in the shareware community who are driven by ego and/or greed to leech off of their fellow man. They're not in the majority, thank heavens, but they do exist. sherm--
