On 1/14/06, Hal Helms <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > So, at $85, authors were effectively being paid minimum wage and > Techspedition made almost nothing from the sale of the book. Instead of > being seen as trying to supply info to a small community and merely trying > to recoup costs, in some corners, it was viewed as an attempt to exploit the > community. To say that has a chilling effect on producing more books is a > gross understatement.
And I berated the community at large for their reaction to that and I bought a copy out of my own pocket pretty much as a protest (and was public about doing so). It really isn't socialism that's at fault here: it's the lack of willingness of the community to pay for anything. People complain about the cost of CF Standard (let alone CF Enterprise), people complain about Will selling his T shirts, people complain about the cost of CFDJ (I complain about it's lack of content, but that's another story). Several people have berated the CF community for being "cheap". As Nando says, everyone is happy to take Ray's stuff for free - and then complain about bugs in his code or that he issues lots of point releases (hey folks, you can't have it both ways you know - be *pleased* that he acknowledges and fixes bugs so quickly!). I've said that Hal & Ben's training is worth every penny. I was lucky enough to have my company pay to bring them in house to train us. I attend conferences because I think they're good value - whilst my company pays for that now, I used to pay out of my own pocket when I was freelance. I think the biggest obstacle to people like Hal & Ben and Joe and others offering paid (but cheap) training is simply that there would be complaints from the community that they are trying to make a fast buck off the community. People are pretty quick to suggest that Hal & Ben hold back documentation in order to sell training and as Nando says, people would likely react badly to Ray starting to charge for upgrades to his software (consider how many people use his BlogCFC vs how many people have actually bought him something from his wishlist). As for the whole Swedish thing, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree - our experiences with Swedes are clearly very different (and I come from a country with high taxes and a strong social welfare system - England - so I know what the environment is like). -- Sean A Corfield -- http://corfield.org/ Got frameworks? "If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive." -- Margaret Atwood ---------------------------------------------------------- You are subscribed to cfcdev. To unsubscribe, send an email to [email protected] with the words 'unsubscribe cfcdev' as the subject of the email. CFCDev is run by CFCZone (www.cfczone.org) and supported by CFXHosting (www.cfxhosting.com). An archive of the CFCDev list is available at www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]
