Re: Registration sucks again

Bruce McGee wrote:
Matthew Jones wrote:

Here's a suggestion: Why not release the software for free after 5 years? Automatically.

It has to be said that this is the whole point of Escrow services.
You give a third party the product to be held in the event of certain situations, like the business going bust. Should that happen, then
they give it to the people they were told to (could be publish on web
site). But that costs money, and just releasing old versions seems a
sensible option really.


You mean 5 years after a release and not 5 years after the parent
company goes out of business, right?

There seems to be plenty of suggestions that CodeGear give stuff away
for free. I don't think this is reasonable. I wouldn't be willing to
do this, so I wouldn't expect anyone else to, either.



My two cents...

I'd love to see it made common practice that at some point after a product is no longer supported, that the source code for the 'old' product be made open source. The license could prevent direct competition with the product, but there are far to many cases of 'forcing' upgrades, or 'bad' upgrades, or changes in the product that make it untenable to use.

This either forces the manufacturer to maintain the product, or to provide another mechanism for the customer to provide their own support.

Of course, I know that kind of stuff will never happen, but one can dream...

David Erbas-White
.

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