Extortionists!

Markku, I think that using the demo and watching the tutorial on youtube can give you a good idea about what you can do with DaDaBIK. I think, honestly, it is enough considering the "investment".

If you don't like the project, well, it is ok, you don't have to.

Of course I don't think DaDaBIK is the perfect solution for everybody but considering how many people use DaDaBIK in the world, I guess it has some good points, but my judge can of course be biased.

Furthermore, considering that many people in the past chose a price higher than the minimum made me think that many people really understood my approach.

If I go into a shop and complain about a $5 product I will become the laughing stock of the neighbourhood. I mean, who does that?

Yet here on the net, everyone is saying they are going to donate and maybe they will pay later but they do not. Why is that companies like rhomobile, facebook, reddit, and just about everybody else you can think of needs millions or even hundreds of millions of upfront cash to get started. The reason is because the people do not pay. No one pays. If you put a product for free everyone thinks that someone else is paying, and so they act or pose as customers when they have no intention of paying at all.

There are millions of scripts for free. No one is donating money to these projects. Unless projects have university or private funding support almost everything goes down the tubes.

So what you are doing by complaining about this script is encouraging a business model that makes sense only for privileged students and people in the correct circles. But other people on the ground are being misled into thinking that they can get a job or get money by making products under the false assumption that someone is going to pay them. But the onus is not on anyone to pay. Thus you have people working where neither themselves nor society will derive much use from the time they are spending, and on top of that time they must still find time to actually get money and also for rest and recreation.

I see posts like yours everywhere complaining about free and mostly open downloads as if you were a paying customer for a highly valued product. Thus the perception that someone, but not yourself, will ultimately pay the people making these things is enforced. But the reality is that no-one or very few people will pay.

Here you have someone willing to share a codebase with you for as low as $5 and then come here and call people "extortionists". Imagine if Microsoft would let you take a peek at their source code for "$500000". There would be some that would be more than willing to pay that premium. Maybe not you but there would be some.

If someone builds something, there is no onus on them to give it to you for free in the first place. Open source does not mean free.

In light of the blatant and quite rude insult given to the provider of the code I hereby rebut your reply and suggest that if you think we are all your slaves and must just keep giving you everything for free then maybe you should stop making promises that one day we will be paid. Because it is absolutely evident that most people talking about money and software these days are just speculating and the fact is that peoples cash is going to stay in their pockets when it comes to the majority of online programming work.

Good day. And I will thank you for not repeating the foul practice of perpetuating blatant myths and perceptions about source code. All software has source code and it means nothing if you can download it for free or not. Logic to the contrary is missing a link.

And BTW, if you have a job as programmer, then why are you harassing or even trying to download free libraries with code. I suspect the reason is because you actually cannot do your job properly. Yes, I think so. Someone with the right connections who does not mind twisting things around to get the money.

Robin,
when you say "Because it is absolutely evident that most people talking about money and software these days are just speculating" you summarize the most lucid analysis I have ever read on this topic since years, and it's exactly what I think. The bad thing is that it seems to be a tabu subject, nobody really talk about that.

For some reason, people started to think that everything, on the Web, needs to be free and they complain if it's not! I am sure there are people who spend $300 for a pair of shoes, but they would complain a lot if they had to pay $3 for downloading a movie or a software. So crazy!

The point is that in many cases, either someone else is paying for the development OR the project die. Have you ever seen how many dead projects are hosted on sourceforge?

A curious myth about free (as in a beer) business models I've heard since years, being in the Open Source world since the beginning, is that you can develop a software, give the software for free and make money with support. No, in most of the cases, you just can't. Why? Simple, because in most of the cases, people just don't need support!

If we talk about services, again, there is a big misunderstanding. For example people perceive Facebook as being free, but USERS are actually giving (FOR FREE) valuable personal information to Facebook, information that years ago a marketing department would have paid gold! Have you ever advertise on Facebook and seen the configuration page? Do it!
If you ask people about paying $5/year to use facebook they think you are crazy. They are probably paying more, even if not directly.

Ironically, Apple, not so popular to be an "open source" company, was the one who reported some "democracy" in the software development world and, in general, on digital goods market. People started to download music paying for that and thousands of developers started selling their goods for a few dollars on the app store.

And, after the Apple "apps" earthquake, I think things started to change, the popularity of site like codecanyon.net is an evidence of that.

I am also providing downloads of code. I placed both the Macaw and OpenRTL projects online for free download at google code. The OpenRTL is new and has not many hits, but the Macaw program has had many downloads. It has been there for a few years. In all that time, I have received one email from someone who wanted to make a small donation, and many other emails with people who were communicating with me like I was the employee and must work for them on the code to build features that they wanted.

So sad to say, and against my best wishes, I am now moving back into other fields of work that do not involve relying on people having the source code.

I think in a decade or two that VPS style hosting will become much cheaper and that libraries of code will be written with compilers that do not require code to be shared. I think people can make money in a system like that. But that is for the future, and now I must get back to trying to make money somehow.

By the way, I see that the Ardour project, which is a highly respectable music program, is doing exactly the same thing that you are doing at their download link. And that is a big program that is linked into the repository of some big distributions of linux. So I see that at ardour, I see it here, I see everyone takes my own stuff and does not say thanks, I see all the closed(but very excellent) projects at sourceforge and at google code, and I guess I have to draw some conclusions about not just Open Source, but about digital goods in general. And on top of all that the same parallel can be drawn with the music industry which has faced massive losses of its own, and also the movie industry, and the games industry!

I think in the future when more safe payment systems and safe payment networks are in place that software providers of all forms, as well as all digital content producers, will experience decent rewards for their work. Especially in the movies, music and games industries. But until the network itself becomes better, I do not think there is much to do about it.

Thanks.

I know ardour, it is very well known in the music industry and I took inspiration from that for the donations. A couple of years ago I also talked with the author exactly about this topic, as far as I understood, he was working with ardour development as his main job and kept it Open Source, not an easy task.

I saw your Macaw and I definitely suggest you to ask for a download fee, seriously!

Sad but I sometime I thought the same about DaDaBIK, I mean about closing the source, because as you can see there are people that don't see the openness as a further advantage (I pay, as for closed source software, but less money and I also get the source code!) but as an excuse to complain (it is open source, so I don't want to pay). I think, however, that now most of the people understand it.

Feel free to write me via email if you want to further discuss that.

Cheers.

Hi Eugenio,

Don't take this wrong, I'm not against the choose-your-own-price idea but I believe that the word "payment" is better than "donation".
Cause it is not really a donation if you are forced to donate when downloading.

Also I would like to buy the product for the company I work for, as I can tell my company to do so with such small ammount.
But I cannot tell my company to donate anything since they have a yearly donation budged, and that is donated and spent during christmas. And I do not influence what organisation they are going to donate to. So because of that I'm unable to use this product and have to use alternatives.

But maybe donation is better for you? You don't have tax it?
But I would love to see a similar option to the donation where you can buy this product instead of donating. You can add the same range of prices but add your sales and income tax to the price.. So instead of 3 EURO you could take 6..

Hi Raboo,
I actually pay exactly the same taxes as a normal payment. And the invoice you receive is just a regular invoice.

Maybe the most correct term would be "variable price", I just think that "donation" is more understandable.

So, to come to your question, you can already make a normal payment from the Website.

Cheers,


E.