> A sad consequence of all this is that Altium actually lose sales and the
> community bcomes more closed as a result of "cracked" versions in
> circulation. A university lecturer friend tells me that ALL the students in
> his classes have got hold of (and sometimes use!) cracked versions of Protel
> and DXP. Altium will find it hard to maintain the moral high ground when
> they charge $10,000 for software that is expensive, is buggy, is always
> going to be buggy and has a limited lifespan. I bought a one-time licence
> for SE a long time ago but when it no longer wants to play with the latest
> Windows OS then I shall be looking around for an affordable alternative. My
> tendency is towards Tsien at the moment; take a look guys.
>
> Robert Gillatt
In this day and age, there are probably very few (if any) software applications
which have not been "cracked" to at least some extent. So to the extent that
there is a difference in that regard, some applications have been cracked to a
greater extent than others.
I have no idea to what extent Altium's products have been cracked; doubtless
the degree of piracy also varies between different countries. But it is still
hard to feel sorry for Altium, given the way it has treated its customers. I
suspect that I am far from the only customer who has prepared a detailed report
describing the nature and scope of a defect, only to not even receive any
response whatsoever to my report. (That hasn't happened on every single
occasion that I have submitted a bug report, but it has still happened on a
number of occasions, and for a significant proportion of bug reports which I
have submitted.)
But given the ongoing development of open-source CAD applications, where the
efforts of developers are augmented by bug-fixes submitted by those
applications' users (and where those users do have the potential to fix any
defects themselves, given that they have access to the relevant source code),
it is becoming increasingly ill-advised for companies such as Altium to treat
their customers so shabilly. While they have managed to survive to date, I
still definitely wouldn't want to make any serious wager that they will still
be around ten years (say) from now; perhaps even five years from now. Although
I have some cause to believe that they might have lifted their act to some
extent with AD2006 (though I can't vouch for personally, given that I have
never used it), it could well still be a case of "too little, too late" in that
regard.
And as far as piracy of software in general is concerned, that could be
regarded as "market forces" in action. So-called "neo-classic" economic theory
stipulates that the "natural" price of any product or service is the marginal
cost associated with providing it. And in the case of software, that cost is
almost zero. (What is the cost of a CD or DVD containing copies of the relevant
files, and the cost of actually creating that CD or DVD?)
In making that observation, I am not condoning piracy. However, such "market
forces" are not the only threat that software companies have to contend with;
they also have to contend with open-source applications, whose developers can
be regarded as providing their "product" to the world-at-large for free.
While there have been some who have attempted to prevent the release of
open-source software, I believe that they all deserve to fail in their efforts.
It is one thing for software companies to be permitted to take action against
those pirating their applications, but they definitely shouldn't also be
permitted to prevent anyone else from releasing any software (which they have
written themselves) into the public domain.
Regards,
Geoff.
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