Gary said: > Last *I* checked, every company using JUST this model were living > on venture capital or they had IPO'd to try and live off stock > investments.
I wouldn't doubt this, as support can be even more costly than development. The overhead can be incredibly large. IBM can turn a profit from support, because they are IBM--and they will sell their support customers new hardware/software. <snip> regarding piracy </snip> > > system is going to have it's share of piracy. It's not an easy > > dilimma to solve. > > It is difficult and the harder it becomes for developers to get a > fair profit for thier work, the less software will be available. This is true, even in the PC market. The Amiga market is very small and unstable at the moment, so a rebirth could be extra vulnerable to what pirates can do. Some companies were able to circumvent piracy by packaging super-goodies with their products. However, it's hard to convince someone to buy a productivity software product because of the cool free t-shirt. (I still have my old Obitus T-shirt, and several of the Psygnosis posters...) I think it is imperitive to change people's opinions of pirated copies and "copies" of software. Anything less will likely fail. Even excellent value in software packages doesn't deter piracy. The netconnect package is evident of that. IIRC, NC-3 was pirated like crazy, by the time the Amiga users should have realized what piracy did. I imagine that V3, and other software, would have been much further along if even half of the pirated copies were paid for. -- -- Regards, Dave 'Targhan' Crawford
