Still no new license -- but draft text available

[Grant Griffin]

Paul Duffin wrote:
> 
> Grant Griffin wrote:
> > ...I'd really like to publish
> > my stuff in free/open form, but I've never been able to figure out a way
> > to motivate even honest people to get off dead center to pay for it that
> > way.
> >
> 
> The easier it is to pay the less motivation that you need. If paying anyone
> anywhere in the world was simply a matter of pressing a button then more
> people would be prepared to pay.

Believe me, we shareware authors make it as easy as we possibly can. 
The whole nutty web thing makes payment fairly easy, but users still
have navigate a couple of pages, type in some information (so we can get
back to them if something goes wrong), and have to put in their credit
card numbers (which still scares many people.)  These aren't gargantuan
tasks, but users still need some fairly strong motivation to undertake
them.

But if you compare that to the effort people need to go through to get
many open-source software packages running (and especially if you made
them hack it to defeat the licensing system), perhaps people would pay. 
But I wouldn't bet my business on it.

I once ran onto an open source package which was free in source form,
but whose binary you had to pay for.  Needless to say, I never succeeded
in compiling it; its make file was fatally flawed.  I was torqued about
that at the time, but still, I thought it was a clever idea--except that
you can't make much money by making customers mad.

(darn-it's-hard-to-make-money-with-open-source-<wink>)-ly y'rs,

=g2
-- 
_____________________________________________________________________

Grant R. Griffin                                       g2 at dspguru.com
Publisher of dspGuru                           http://www.dspguru.com
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