hummel@m.cs.uiuc.edu (07/25/89)
> I was at a SF convention a couple of months ago. They had a "computer room", > as some of them do. Inside were three or four Amigas. > > Also inside were some THOUSAND 3.5" diskettes, with every program ever > conceived for the Amiga on them. And among them was not ONE original disk. > NOT ONE. [ ... ] What I saw could have easily amounted to grand theft many > times over - there had to be $50,000 in pirated software there. That is > $50,000 that software authors and publishers DIDN'T receive, but should have. So what did you DO about it? There is plenty that you could do in such a situation, so I'm sure that you did something to directly address it, right? Do you not think that piracy, like racism, bigotry, and bad manners :-) is one of those things that you are condoning when you let an incident pass without intervention? > After seeing this I decided then and there that my company would never produce > an Amiga product. I've never seen something like this in the MSDOS or Unix > world. Piracy, yes. Piracy on this kind of scale -- people writing boot > loaders to specifically crack protection?! This was my first experience, > and I was horrified. You haven't looked closely at the microcomputer software market, then. On the Apple II f'rinstance, stuff like boot tracing and memory snapshot hardware (!) were common. I'm sure the MS-DOS and Macintosh pirates are at least as advanced as that. You might want to make this distinction: One has to know something about the platform in order to crack protected software. One doesn't have to know squat in order to pirate it. I think someone else was hitting the nail on the head when he described the Amiga as having a core of sophisticated users who do not condone piracy, similar to what can be found in the UNIX user base and parts of the MS-DOS and Macintosh user bases. However, like MS-DOS and Macintosh, there will also be Amigas sold to market segments that harbor pirates (pun). And, if UNIX ever showed up in the right (wrong?) markets, you'd be able to find rampant piracy there as well. > We'll stay with Unix products, even though we could write some really killer > packages for the Amy. If we're only going to get paid for one out of every > 20 copies, it's not worth the hassle. Create a quality product that has value, sell it at a competitive price with a good set of documentation, and provide good tech. support. You should be quite successful, since you probably have a larger base of non-pirating Amiga owners than for all of your UNIX platforms combined. > Wise up people. If you pirate enough the people who make the products you > are _stealing_ will stop producing software, you'll have nothing to use, and > the hardware companies will go out of business too (since without software a > computer is useless!) Why should one stop producing software if it is profitable to continue producing even in the face of piracy? You don't go out of business because there is so much piracy, but rather because there are too few sales. In some cases, the two go together, but sometimes piracy is blamed where a faulty product or poor marketing is the true culprit. If Commodore and the cadre of third-party developers are reaching enough of the consumer and educational markets (there are plenty of honest people out there), plus the business and high-end markets with the Amiga, you'll sell software no matter what the pirate-shmucks are doing. < Lionel ---------- Lionel Hummel 404 W. High St. #6, Urbana, IL 61801 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign [H] (217)344-5303 [W] (217)333-7408 hummel@cs.uiuc.edu {pur-ee,uunet}!uiucdcs!hummel BIX: lhummel "Amiga: THE multitasking personal workstation"
mark@xrtll.UUCP (Mark Vange) (07/29/89)
People who appeal to software developers to not stop developing because they are not losing money on the deal are being naive. The question is not whether they will lose money, the question is, can they make more money doing something else. If the software breaks even (that is investment=profits), you might as well have not bothered at all, and kept your money in the bank! -- Mark Vange Phone Death Threats to: Vanguard Distributing (416) 730-1352 mark@xrtll 8 Everingham Ct. North York "Every absurdity has a champion Ont, Canada M2M 2J5 to defend it." - Oliver Goldsmith
karl@sugar.hackercorp.com (Karl Lehenbauer) (08/02/89)
In article <332@xrtll.UUCP>, mark@xrtll.UUCP (Mark Vange) writes: > People who appeal to software developers to not stop developing because they > are not losing money on the deal are being naive. The question is not > whether they will lose money, the question is, can they make more money > doing something else. Not entirely. The programming environment is worth a lot. I will tolerate making less money (to a degree) writing for a machine that I like to program over writing for one that I do not like to program. Many other Amiga developers would concur, I think. Plus, for games, the Amiga is head and shoulders above its counterparts, period. -- -- uunet!sugar!karl Official opinions of Hackercorp -- clip and save -- free Usenet access: (713) 438-5018