Re: [MacPerl] Distributables?

[Richard Gordon <gordon@mindspring.com>]

On 1/29/99 at 00:51, raffael@mediaone.net (Raffael Cavallaro) wrote:

> 1. Users have different levels of computer skill. The more difficult it is
> to get around your copy protection, the fewer sales you lose.
> 
I think that's what I was trying to say by picking on AOL people.

> 2. Providing source not only puts your app out there unprotected, it allows
> others to use the source to make their own, competing products - i.e., it
> not only loses sales, it helps your competitor into the bargain.

To me, there are two levels of this. First, if one of you guys wanted to use
something or part of something that I wrote and asked first or at least told
me what was going on, I could care less as long as it went both ways and I
got some reasonable attribution (which I suppose is what the Perl Artistic
License says). But if some gigantic nest of brilliant but Evil Bastards (to
use Hunter S. Thompson's favorite phrase) who ought to be able to think of
these things themselves not only grabbed it, but claimed that they thought of
it in order to assure their prosperity on, let's say Mercer Island, then I
would be greatly honked and ready to go to war. My prospects of pinning back
their ears would be much better if I could show that $theircode eq $mycode
and that $mycode was restricted to paying customers. As a corollary, open
source also means that the Evil Bastards could probably find something
somewhere that preceded what I did even tho I never knew about it and the
bets are off at that point. Maybe that just means that I should have spent
more time looking and less time thinking, but I'm not sure that this is a
good thing.

Again, I'm not knocking open source as such. It is economically viable so
long as you are not dealing with distributables and, from what I've seen, the
product is much superior.

Richard Gordon
Gordon Consulting & Design
Voice: 770-565-8267  Fax: 770-971-6887



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