a. This is not a pissing contest. You're unhappy.
This is not a valid reason for annoying other members
on this list.
I posted a note about my dissatisfaction with the nag screen. People
criticized me for it. I responded to that criticism. I didn't realize
that in order to be a member in good standing of this list, I had to
agree with everyone first. I didn't realize that e-mails devoid of
warm and fuzzy praise for Bare Bones were considered annoying. Go
through the e-mails. See who lodged personal attacks. It wasn't
me...I still haven't done that.
All I did was criticize Bare Bones for what I believe is a short-
sighted, counter-productive policy that penalizes legitimate users in
order to stop OTHER PEOPLE who pirate. Maybe people didn't like my
"tone"...I understand that, and I apologize for it. But please also
understand that treating paying customers like petty criminals isn't
exactly a way to elicit feel-good words from said customers.
b. Being a zealot about an issue is not conducive to
finding a viable solution.
I'm not in a position to find a viable solution. I can only find work-
arounds. By definition, this is something that can only be solved by
Bare Bones. I can suggest solutions, and I have, as have others, but
I have no way of knowing whether those proposals are under
consideration by the powers that be within Bare Bones.
Some nice folks suggested work-arounds, but it still doesn't solve
the underlying problem. As more and more people add computers to
their home networks, I'm sure you will see this problem arise more
frequently. And for every one person like me who speaks up, there are
probably many more customers who simply keep quiet and decide against
upgrading when the next version comes out.
c. If you were willing to take the time that you spend
in bitching about the software to tell us what you
exact needs are, someone on this list may be able
to give you an alternative.
My exact needs are this: I would like to be able to run the software
I paid for on as many machines as I like. As long as nobody else is
using the software concurrently, what's the harm in having a BBEdit
instance sitting idle on another machine? (I like the idling solution
proposed by another listmember. It addresses Bare Bones's anti-piracy
concerns without being overly punitive towards paying customers.)
I like keeping my apps open, with documents in them, so when I am at
the machine, I don't have to start everything up again to get to my
workspace. I like keeping log files in the window, so when I switch
in to BBEdit, they get reloaded and I can keep a quick eye on them. I
like my workspace to be there when I am ready for it. I like my
systems to work the way I want them to, not the way software vendors
want me to. That's why I bought a Mac in the first place.
Why should I have to go through the rigamarole of working around the
anti-piracy measures which are obviously geared towards NON-PAYING
users. I am a paying user, and I don't appreciate being treated like
a crook.
Some people are playing linguistic tricks with the word "user", and
others are defending the practice by saying that other companies are
worse. Well, where I come from, a user is a person, and I am one
person, therefore I am one user, and a single-user license should
allow me to use it however I see fit. And other companies may have
found worse solutions, which is precisely why I will never buy from
them. Headaches like this are one of the reasons more people are
being driven to open source solutions.
To reiterate previously proposed solutions, so that this conversation
might become more productive:
1. GREAT SOLUTION - Use the same licensing rules as Yojimbo.
2. GOOD SOLUTION - Add the idle-checking to the nag boxes so that if
people aren't using the instances on other machines (which is pretty
hard to do physically anyway), people don't get pestered by the
software. Nag the people who are breaking the rules, not those who
aren't.
3. OK SOLUTION - Add the ability to save all & quit a remote instance
from the nag box of another machine.
d. There's a solution that works in this situation, that
worked with Adobe software 10+ years ago. I'm not
sure that I'm in the frame of mind that I want to tell
you what that workaround is, though.
Well, if you should ever find yourself in that frame of mind, I would
appreciate hearing it. (I'm assuming it requires shutting down the
network or a portion thereof...not really an option for me since I
have all sorts of automated cron-based syncing happening between
machines for backups, etc.) But telling paying customers--yes, I am
apparently the only chump who paid full price--that you have a
solution but you aren't in the mood to give it to them is not exactly
the best way to engender goodwill with an already-pissed-off customer.
If you think
about what the software is doing, I think it's rather
obvious.
I'm guessing some UDP packet broadcasting. Unfortunately, Little
Snitch doesn't seem to report the network activity BBEdit is
initiating. Apparently, the network traffic isn't initiated by the
BBEdit process itself. It looks like BBEdit is piggybacking on some
OS-level service, like Bonjour, but I haven't yet been able to figure
out how to get around it without shutting down ALL of Bonjour and
knocking out all my other Bonjour services like iTunes sharing and
AirPort Express's remote speaker capability.
Oh -- and I much prefer BBEdit's 'check on startup' to
MS Office's 'check all the time, and when I think there's
something else on the network, because Virtual PC is
flaking out, I'm going to dump you out of the app'.
BBEdit does NOT just check on startup. It checks all the time. How do
I know? Because if I start a third instance on any machine, ALL the
machines start putting up the nag boxes. And the nag boxes keep
coming up until one instance is shut down. So, it IS checking all the
time.
--
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