> Lindsay> That's how we feel. Our customers are people who *DO* write > Lindsay> their own home-grown versions of our product, and we don't > Lindsay> want them casually lifting pieces of our prodcut, improving > Lindsay> their home-grown stuff, then not buying our stuff. > > Then your pricing model is wrong. If you have a good relationship > with your customer, 85% of them will Do The Right Thing and come to > you for modifications. And making those 85% suffer for the 15% > that rob and steal, just isn't good business.
I don't mean to stir anything up here. I sense that many people have strong opinions, and I don't think that there is a right or wrong answer. However, my point of view is as follows: Basically, I think that different classes of customer will react in different ways, so there is no sweeping generalisation to be made here. For example I suspect that most home customers will be in the "steal" category. Many business customers I suspect will either: a) Typical corporate: Want a packaged product with known support, with a good pedigree, etc (regardless of whether it is best or cheapest) b) Tech department has more weight: Take the cheapest, or best value, c) Build their own by lifting all the best bits out of your product and others. Or at least by just not sending you any money and using your product. a) Is an interesting study in human nature. For example one company that I know of will not use Apache because "We have standardised on microsoft products here. We believe that they all work together well as a suite and so we don't want to bring in third party products that we might not be able to support". This despite the fact that I would have said that IIS was a complete pig to maintain and Apache is frequently suprisingly easy in comparison. This attitude is quite common b) Great. c) Witness that MS has had FAST peering down the necks of all small businesses in the UK for the last year or so. A huge number of companies have had "free software audits" to help them get their licencing in order. This has mainly been instigated by MS (well who else has the money to lobby for this kind of thing), but the reality is that most businesses do appear to be licencing just a fraction of all the software they use (frequently less than the 85% you quote...) For example I wonder how many copies of Winzip are licenced, despite it being widely installed, and avilable for about �5 a seat (in volume) when I last looked (a few years ago) Anyway, I don't know what the answer is, but I don't believe that people neglect to pay for software because they want to "steal" it. I think that there is a lot of casual, inadvertant theft, and also just plain laziness (never got round to it... Sorry mate). A friend of mine told me that he had written some shareware a few years back. I asked him how much he made from it and he told me �26... (I don't think the software was terrible, the point was more than people never got round to paying for it..) Anyway, please don't anyone get emotional about this. I think it is a very interesting debate, but I don't think there is a clear right answer yet (remember that I am quite pro Open Source as well) > This is why I wouldn't buy from you if you had closed source. It > means you don't trust me, or you're already ripping me off. Neither > of those bode well for me as the customer. Well, I think that is a great attitude. I hope that more people will start thinking this way. However, I have a problem in that much of the software that I really like (and I believe is best of breed) is closed source, eg photoshop, some panorama software I use, some video apps, etc. What should I do...? I could survive without these applications, but it rather feels like "cutting my nose off to spite my face" kind of thing. Thanks all Ed W
