Re: 30 days trial immune to set clock back in time?

On Sep 21, 3:13 pm, "Chronic Philharmonic" <karl.uppi...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
<reckonin...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1c4abb0e-8c37-4093-92d9-72fd631d78ad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Sep 20, 5:56 pm, Roedy Green <see_webs...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
[snip]

NO FEEDBACK LOOPS!

What I write in response to Roedy is no skin off your nose.

Ridiculous. He's insisting that he should get paid over and over again
for doing a piece of work just once, unlike say a stonemason who has
to lay more bricks to make more money. Furthermore, he's attempting to
destroy other peoples' property, namely, their copies of the software
he authored.

The expiration behavior should be clearly stated in the license or download
agreement. If you don't like the fact that my software "decays" or "rots" or
"expires", you're free to opt out and find another vendor.

It's ridiculous. You would perform extra work to make your product
artificially less functional than it otherwise would have been? How
perverse.

Anyone who finds that morally offensive is free to offer an alternative --
if you prefer that model, then by all means support them with your business!

That is exactly what I do. I hardly ever pay for software these days,
only for ongoing services such as support. I mainly patronize FOSS
providers such as Mozilla.

Sure it is. At a banquet, if you eat one of the food items, that item
is unavailable for anyone else to eat, and the operator's costs rise
rapidly in proportion to the amount of food provided. This is
emphatically not the case with software or any other form of data,
particularly not when the distribution is viral rather than from a
central repository.

So what? I can still design my software in a way that limits it's lifetime.

Sure you can. It's just stupid to do so, and not morally wrong for
someone else to undo your nasty bit of user-hostile programming.

It is a "feature", no different than any other feature

Sure it is. A genuine feature provides added value to the end-user.
What you are discussing not only fails to do so, it actually REMOVES
value for the end-user. That is not a feature; it is a hole where a
feature used to be.

Yep -- in case you somehow hadn't guessed or heard this before, the
fact that a copy of a piece of software does not intrinsically wear
out or break down from age is a feature, not a bug. So is the fact
that information can be reproduced at zero marginal cost, and without
the involvement of the originator of that information.

Here's a suggestion: You should avoid software that contains features you
strongly dislike.

I already do avoid software that contains intentional bugs or
deliberately lacks features.

If my profit and market share diminishes as a result, I will be forced to
change it (it's the free market at work here).

And I'll be right there to tell you "I told you so".

(P.S. judging by your behavior it looks like maybe you're a sockpuppet
of the thread's OP. Are you?)

Software copies are inherently free; software development is not. It
is best not to confuse the two.

Spam is free.

Irrelevant comments in Usenet posts are also apparently free.

If there were a cost associated with it, spam would die out overnight.

There is a cost associated with spam, but it's incurred by the
recipient. The economics of spam closely resembles the economics of
air pollution, water pollution, and various other environmental no-
nos.

The economics of spam is also utterly irrelevant to the present
discussion.

The way to achieve that is to create an escrow account that people can
pay money into; if a target amount is reached, the money is used to
develop the software, which then becomes available to everyone. Those
who paid get it sooner than if they hadn't, and may be given extras
(such as signed gold-plated CDs or whatever). If the target looks like
it will never be reached, the money is returned to the investors with
whatever interest it had earned and the software doesn't get made.

That is *your* preferred embodiment.

That is *the* fairest way to robustly do what was described, and it's
not that dissimilar from the industry-standard way to fund R&D and
startups in, well, pretty much every other industry on earth.

Choose the vendors that embrace it.

Already do, it and other business models that don't involve artificial
scarcity or infringements of my property rights.

If enough people do that, the other models will die a natural death in the
free market.

That process has already begun. Hence my recommendation to the OP.

A century ago, I'd have been noticing Stanley steamers and very early-
model Fords putt-putting on the streets in small but growing numbers,
put two and two together, and advised people not to invest heavily in
buggy whip futures.

For exactly the same reasons as I made my recent recommendation to the
OP here.

You are at liberty to vote with your dollars every day of your life.

Of course.

Say, is it just my imagination, or are several people here laboring
under the misapprehension that I advocated something other than the OP
choosing, of his or her own volition, a different and less user-
hostile business model?

This is precisely how a lot of R&D is done -- investors chip in and a
product is developed. Only the scheme described above is much less
risky for the investors, assuming the escrow account is managed by a
trusted party such as a respected and accredited bank.

If that is true, then people will gravitate to it naturally, and you will
eventually get what you want.

See above -- but it's not about what I want, it's about what is best
for the OP. Entering the buggy whip market while Ford is busy erecting
its second, larger assembly plant simply is not wise, and I decided to
point that out when I heard someone announcing their intentions to do
so.

If not, then you will have to put up with a
model you don't like, but one that the majority of vendors and customers
prefer.

No, customers do not, as a rule, prefer their products to be less
useful than they otherwise might be, and especially prefer their
products not to have been deliberately sabotaged. Remember the
infamous exploding Pinto and other backfirings of "value engineering"
in the automotive industry, culminating in the domestic manufacturers
eventually losing enormous chunks of market share to Japanese
manufacturers?
.

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