jiro@heights.cit.cornell.edu (01/07/90)
I am in the process of developing a couple programs on the NeXT computer. I was wondering what the NeXT commu- nity's feeling about the methods of distributing low cost software should be. I've already released two programs, one of them, "define" (a webster's dictionary for ascii terminals) is in the public domain. The other, Cassandra v0.8 is "ChristmasWare," (no legal obligation to send me $5, but Santa says you should). Cassandra is going along nicely now, but I've found out that I'm spending too much time, and at the expense of too many things, to give it out for basically nothing. And the response to the ChristmasWare idea has been pretty absymal. I enjoy developing software on the NeXT. It's a great computer for programming and I enjoy the freedom of being an independent developer. But, I am also not rich, and money is always welcome. I am sure the other independents out there would agree with me. The question pops up again and again. How should we distribute low-cost software? FreeWare or its cousin, ChristmasWare are ideal for the charitably minded. ShareWare is .... questionable in its performance. "Send me cash and an OD, etc." seems to be one of the best solutions. However, I was thinking along the lines of FrameMaker's way of doing things. It is fairly easy to put a machine specific password protection like they do onto programs. All you have to do is take the ethernet address and hash it in a given way. The user sends in his/her cash and his/her ethernet address, and you send back the hashed password. He/she enters the password in, and the previously locked features are released. Would people agree to this? What features should be locked? The "Save" or "Print"? Or, maybe if we weren't so stringent, should a big warning panel come up saying "You haven't paid!"? I would like to know users' feelings about this matter. Comp.sys.next doesn't have much traffic, but if you post to me via e-mail, I'll summarize in a later posting. - Jiro Nakamura- jiro@heights.cit.cornell.edu jiro (BIX) and suggestions