Clever Monkey <spamtrap@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Michael Ash wrote:
>> Clever Monkey <spamtrap@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>> While I might agree in principle, there is little evidence to suggest
>>> that /other/ people feel, or act, the same way. A non-intrusive
>>> licensing model is often the only way to actually, you know, get paid
>>> for your work without pissing off the majority of your users.
>>
>> Given how many successful software companies out there use nothing
beyond
>> a name and serial number, and how few use more sophisticated licensing
>> schemes, I object to your use of the word "often" in that sentence.
>>
> The article I quoted addresses this very situation. Did you read it?
Certainly, I've read it several times in the years since it was posted.
I'm not sure what you mean though. I merely object to your claim that such
schemes are "often" the only way to survive in the business. It may have
been necessary in this one case, we don't know, but that doesn't disprove
my point at all.
>> It may be necessary, rarely, to use such a scheme in order to stay
afloat.
>> It may be helpful in many more instances, but we simply can't know for
>> sure. In any case, it's obviously possible to run a successful software
>> company without fancy licensing schemes, since there are a large number
of
>> existence proofs out there.
>>
> Again, the article I quoted suggests this, as well. The problem was
> that, for this particular company, they found that the number of people
> who simply grabbed serial numbers off the web was much higher than they
> anticipated. As in, the opposite of their assumptions, which was that
> people are by and large honest and will gladly cough up the $19 or
> whatever. This surprised them.
Certainly. But again, one company does not make an "often", and maximizing
revenue is not the same as making a living.
> The received wisdom that the majority of your users will behave honestly
> if you treat them a certain way was exactly what this particular person
> found was not the case. So, unfortunately, this assumption may not be
> as true as we might like it to be.
Maybe I just hit the scene too late, but I never received this wisdom.
Common wisdom in my circle is that piracy happens, it's pretty common, and
it's hard to defeat. Any anti-piracy measure which makes life harder for
legitimate users in any way is something that should be considered
extremely carefully. Pretty much by definition, pirates are people who
don't want to give you money anyway.
> It is true that we may not know for sure if people are abusing your
> licensing, but this also means that there is little evidence that the
> opposite is true, and the majority of your users are actually paying for
> the software they use.
>
> Yes, software companies continue to be in business. Some have decided
> to allow for volume sales, or higher per-unit prices, to cover the cost
> of losses. In the realm most of us live in, however, the margins can
> get quite thin, and few smaller shops can afford that for very long. In
> this case a small developer company decided they couldn't continue to
> bleed licenses if they wanted to keep their children in diapers and
> shoes. This, despite a very liberal sort of license accounting that
> depended on, and assumed a basic honesty and diligence on the part of
> most of their user base.
Sure, I understand this, but Ambrosia is in fact a rarity in using the
scheme they do in the business that they are in. If you go out and buy Mac
software, whether it's shareware, commercial, boxed, downloaded, whatever,
the vast majority doesn't have this sort of scheme. Perhaps they're all
slowly going out of business, but I see no evidence to suggest this.
My personal suspicion is that Ambrosia gets hit harder than most because
most of their products are games which tends to hit the teenage pirate
demographic much more than other sorts of products, but I have no real
evidence for this.
> If the question is "are a majority of my user base using paid copies of
> the software", then the answer is not very well known unless you collect
> some empirical evidence (i.e., the license logs collected in the quoted
> article).
That is the absolute wrong question to be asking if your goal is to stay
in business and make money, but a lolt of developers focus on it,
unfortunately.
Many people find it hard to accept (I'm not saying you're one of them,
just that this is a common attitude), but it's irrelevant to your
personally whether your userbase is 1% pirated, 10% pirated, or 90%
pirated. What matters in terms of cash flow, which ought to be your main
goal, is how big the paying userbase is. In other words, it's better to
have a userbase of 2X with a 60% piracy rate than it is to have a userbase
of X with a 25% piracy rate.
Now the piracy rate can be helpful to know when you're thinking about
implementing some anti-piracy measure, but it's not that helpful. You have
no idea how many of these pirates will end up buying your software because
of it, how many will find a crack and keep using it, and how many will
just abandon the prorduct.
That last category may make you feel good, but it's very im****tant to keep
in mind that you don't actually lose anything to a pirate who uses your
software and has no intention of buying. By chasing him away you lose at
least a little, in terms of vague things like mindshare and his
recommendations to other people who might pay in the future.
> Anyway, the reason I mention the article is to direct the OP at a modest
> licensing scheme that attempts to find the balance between treating your
> customers fairly, and ensuring you are actually getting paid for a
> larger majority of those installs in use.
Certainly, and I think it's great to have all available information. But
it's im****tant to know what people are using too. From my experience on
the platform, the vast majority of products that I'm exposed to use either
a license code or a name/code combination with no online verification. A
tiny minority use some kind of activation system like Ambrosia does, and I
try to avoid those products simply because I don't like the idea. It's
possible that all these other companies are losing out by not implementing
a similar scheme, but I doubt it, and I am personally grateful that they
don't.
--
Michael Ash
Rogue Amoeba Software
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