On May 16, 2006, at 3:09 PM, Rich Siegel wrote:
The spirit and letter of the license are such that you may install
BBEdit on as many machines as you like, as long as only one copy is in
use at any given time. Unfortunately, a number of years ago, we found
that a noticeable number of unscrupulous outfits were abusing the
license, and sharing a single BBEdit license inside of a workgroup or
company.
So you've made a business decision to annoy some of your paying
customers because OTHER people are pirating. Not a good way to
engender goodwill and loyalty among your scrupulous customers. If
BBEdit treats legit customers no differently than pirates, what's the
advantage of being legitimate?
Maybe you should consider some sort of 5-user home license. With the
Mac mini, more and more homes are going to be having multiple Macs. I
tend to use the one that's near me, and if I've accidentally left
BBEdit open on another machine, it is a hassle to go down there, quit
that one, and then go back to where I was. I'd pay an extra $20 or so
for a multi-machine home license, but I'm not going to pay $400 extra
just to run BBEdit cleanly on 3 home machines.
Consequently, a long time ago we put in place a mechanism to nudge
such
users toward doing the right thing. The mechanism takes into
account the
common usage pattern in which the licensed user has two machines
(typically a laptop and a desktop) so as to avoid unnecessary
annoyance
in this common case.
Maybe I never noticed it before because yesterday I was trying figure
out why my Dock on one machine was behaving differently from the
other two. I opened the Dock's .plist on each machine and tried to
compare the differences. That's when I started noticing the problem.
There's no need for you to purchase any additional licenses; all you
need to do is quit whatever copy(ies) of BBEdit you're not actively
using. Or, if you have it running on a machine that's infrequently
used,
install TextWrangler there instead.
That doesn't work if I need to have three instances open at once,
such as in my example above. All of my home machines get similar use,
depending on which one is nearest at the moment.
I think your ire is misdirected, though. :-)
You're entitled to your opinion. I generally like BBEdit, but I don't
like being treated like a crook by a company whose product I am
purchasing. I understand you need to stem piracy, but punish the
pirates, not the paying customers.
This experience is making me seriously reconsider my need for such an
expensive text editor, especially one that after 8 versions still
can't remember what size I like new document windows to be.
I hope you don't go this route with Yojimbo, because it just might
make me swear off Bare Bones software forever.
Despite all that, I do appreciate the rapid response. It shows that
Bare Bones isn't entirely beyond redemption.
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