At 06:49 AM 7/23/99 -0400, Art Dahm wrote:
>Why do you care? Don't you want your application to get as much exposure as
>possible?
>
>I'd be extremely happy if I woke up one morning to find that every human
>being on the planet had "Image Viewer III" tattooed on their foreheads
>(along with a brief description, screen shot and a link to my web page). :-)
I agree with Art. As developers we seriously need to *think* about what
sort of licensing policies we attempt to enforce. I emphasize the word
*think* because it seems to me that developer peoples too often react with
a gut instinct to "protect their baby" instead of rationally sorting out
the pros and cons of different policies.
Since I'm a gray-haired old programmer it is my duty to tell you a tale of
days gone by . . In one of my previous lives I worked for a company called
Banyan Systems (makers of Banyan Vines). At one time Banyan ran
neck-and-neck against Novell in the field of network-OS type software for
DOS systems. The version of Netware at that time (2.x something) was
notoriously easy to copy. Vines, on the other hand, was pretty well locked
down using a hardware dongle that you connected to the parallel port of the
server that ran Vines. The result was that Netware spread like a virus
while Vines was adopted at a much slower rate. What do you think happened
when Novell came out with newer versions of Netware ? Many of the people
who had previously been using stolen copies *bought* the newer version !
This is one of the reasons everyone on this list knows who Novell is but
maybe 5% of you know who Banyan is/was.
Gilbert W. Pilz Jr.
Senior Consulting Engineer
SeaLion Software Inc.
www.clion.com
