[Tfug] OT : Site Scaper

[Joe Roberts]

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 11:45 PM, Bexley Hall <bexley401 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Then, they spend energy *increasing* the costs of their products to
> support protection mechanisms (DRM, RCE, Macrovision, etc.).

Which has been a disaster, obviously, in that you wind up irritating
paying customers who want to platform-shift or something while the
pirates just go around it.

> OTOH, things like "shareware" invariably get poor returns -- even
> when the "product" is widely used (I have a friend who authored a
> widely used product who claims to have received exactly *one*
> "donation"; as a result, he simply stopped supporting it.  Folks
> who liked the original found themselves with a dead-end product...
> and probably grumbled when there were no bug-fix updates, etc.)

I think one thing we do need in the free software world is a "support
your favorite free software project" holiday whereby the whole
community encourages, maybe for a week a year, donating to your
favorite projects.

Shareware is a little different because it's still much like closed
commercial software, except you get to try it out.  I wonder whether
or not in the long run you could make more money just releasing things
for free and taking donations.  For awhile I've been a proponent of
bountyware, which is a system whereby a software author could release
updates when bounty thresholds were met.  This could apply to music as
well.

The idea would be that once the bounty was met, the software (or
music) would be free for everyone.  So for example, a musician could
say something like, OK, I'm going around the record companies (which I
think we'll see more of as they fade into irrelevancy), and I have a
new album here, and here's a place you can contribute money, and when
I hit the threshold I set, this gets released for free to the public -
to everyone.

Software updates could work this way, too.  It would make people into
patrons rather than consumers.  There are some precedents for this
whereby the community has gotten together and bought old commercial
software and released it as free software.

I'm all for people doing hard work being compensated but the way it is
now it just not functional anymore.

> Of course!  I'm sure MS has been keenly aware of the copying
> problem they face(d).  And, I am sure there are much more
> robust mechanisms that they could have employed to cut down on
> that copying.  Yet, they obviously decided that X% loss was
> worth bearing when the alternative was to divert manpower to
> come up with protection mechanisms, etc.

Also piracy has contributed to making Windows ubiquitous.  I'm not
saying this is a rationale for piracy, but it is a curious
side-effect.  Same with Photoshop to a large degree.

  -JR