 |
|
|
|
|
From a recent Outer Marker thread on the subject of software piracy...
Ron,
Yesterday I briefly visited each of the sites you mentioned. I don't want to name them here because I don't want to give people ideas. However, I will now speak to the general readership regarding the broad outlines of what I saw yesterday ...
What is going on out there is absolutely appalling, far worse than I had ever imagined. I don't directly mean in sales and dollars lost to the developers of high-end aircraft, I mean in terms of the total outlaw mentality.
As just one example, I saw people proudly posting cease-and-desist demand letters they had received from their victims, as badges of their skill not only in ripping off the developers, and in charging for their pirated warez, but also, and most importantly, in thumbing their noses in public at the whole concept of law and order, not to speak of ethics and morality.
Western civilization is in big trouble, folks. What restraints on behavior remain are fast disappearing. This is what it was like toward the end of Ancient Rome - - decay from within. Ron and I disagree on many things, but one thing I must now agree with him on is that it is absolutely imperative that we try to try to slow if not reverse the decline.
The microscopic context is that of FS add-on customers, their - - no, OUR - - choice being between The Force and The Dark Side. The macroscopic context is the fate of western civilization. I'm not kidding. Yesterday I saw with my own eyes what is really at stake here.
And Ron, I would not have achieved Stage One Of Enlightenment without your help. Thanks.
Mike McCarthy, fsOC Core Team
Mike, the real truth is/has been known by FS developers for a long time. Considering the fact that FS developers get it from both ends it's a wonder that many put up with what is going on from outside and inside the FS community.
This very thread illustrates the fact that some of the customer base is all too ready to make the developer/customer relationship into an adversarial mishmash that has no good outcome for either.
If all of this comes to its logical end then it's not a stretch to imagine developers shutting their doors to avoid dealing with hostile customer base within and pirates without.
Those who frequent and use the content of illegal sites really are cutting their own throats with regard to the future of high fidelity content being offered by all commercial developers. How long it might take for such a scenario to be fully realised is anyones guess at this point
Best, Regards,
Ron Hamilton
Ron,
Based on what I learned yesterday, I'm writing an Op-Ed article that tells it like it is. It will run, I hope, on the front page of FlightSim.Com, and I hope it will run PDQ.
One of the things I do well is writing, along with motivating people through my writing. It is now my obligation to put the Celtic Writing Genes to work on behalf of this cause, which is going to affect me as well as you and all the other 3PDs.
Watch for this Op-Ed, it shouldn't be long at all.
Mike McCarthy, fsOC Core Team
Folks,
I thought this discussion could be postponed, maybe for a couple of years, but I realize now that it can't be held off. If not now, then when? If not on the most important FS-related web site, then where? In this Op-Ed I'm going to make one aspect of the piracy issue very clear, by personalizing it...
Most of you either have families to support, or you are a family member who is being supported by your parents. For discussion purposes let's say that you're a parent, a breadwinner.
You are living paycheck to paycheck just like most of us are. You have always made your mortgage payments on time, and usually you've been able to pay the rest of your bills on time, but there really isn't a lot of headroom here. You go into credit card debt at Christmastime and then you spend many months paying that debt down. Maybe you're making tuition payments. You're certainly making car payments. Who knows what else.
One thing's for sure: Except in the form of temporary credit card debt, you can't spend money you don't have. But you want your family to live The American Dream so you crowd things a bit - - and as a result you're living from paycheck to paycheck.
In fact, if you're like most Americans, you're perhaps only two paychecks away from disaster.
Now let's suppose that your job is to work as a developer in a small payware add-on company. No...wait a minute...better still, let's make you the owner. As a businessman you want to control costs so you can keep your product prices as low as possible, so as many people as possible will be able to buy your product. So what do you do?
Well, one of the things that you probably will do as the owner of the business is to make unemployment insurance tax payments for your employees, as required by law, but you probably are going to forgo them for yourself, which most states permit. In other words, in the event of disaster your employees will be eligible for unemployment checks, but you will not.
It goes with the territory of owning a small business, folks. No safety net.
You might even be paying yourself less than you pay some of your employees, because your business is vitally dependent on their skills, and therefore in some sense they come first as regards earning power. In fact, because sales of the current products have perhaps begun to decline, and because sales of the new product that has been under development for the past 18 months have not yet kicked in, you will do what every employer with a conscience will do: When things get tight you will take out a second mortgage in order to be able to pay your employees when that next payday rolls around.
That's right. Under these kinds of circumstances, you won't get paid, they will. But you will still have that second mortgage to pay down on top of all your other normal expenses.
Again, this is what it's like to run a small business. You knew the risks when you started, and you know the risks now, and you don't mind because this is as things should be. This risk is the price of your rewards for owning and operating the business, if only the rewards will come, see below.
You're the one with "tuchis on tisch", as is said in Yiddish - - the one whose money is on the table. Yet in the event of a downturn, you are the first one to be hurt, because that's the way things are supposed to be. You put your employees' interests ahead of your own, just as you put your kids' interests ahead of your own, and for the same reason...
Because it would simply be unconscionable to do anything else.
Let's change gears for a moment. Let's make you a worker in a factory instead of owner of that payware add-on company. Your job in the factory is important, and you're good at it. You're new to the company, only been there 12 months or so, but already you've been promoted to foreman and life is good. Again, because you want your family to live The American Dream, you buy new beds for the kids, and you buy a new couch for your wife...No...Instead you buy a camper trailer so that you'll finally be able to go someplace on vacation instead of hanging around the house.
Nothing fancy, just a basic camper trailer that is pulled by the used Jeep you just bought to tow it. The family can sleep in the trailer when the weather is too foul to camp out. It is a basic trailer, just large enough to also hold the clothes, and the medicines, and the toys, and the movie DVDs, and the DVD player, and all the other small luxuries you added recently because, while you don't want to blow your new and somewhat larger budget, you do want your family to live better, because that's the American way. That's The American dream.
So this year you finally get to go to Yellowstone National Park, because that's a place your wife has wanted to see since she was a little girl. And then you go to The Dalles, on the Columbia River, because you've always wanted to catch a big salmon in a big river. And you go to Hollywood, where you all stroll down the Walk of Fame, reading the brass celebrity names in the brass five-pointed stars because that's what your daughter has always wanted to do. And then you head south for your last important stop on this first vacation ever, a visit to Disneyland, where your son has always wanted to go.
And that was it. A two week driving vacation. You didn't stay in fancy hotels, you stayed in KOA campgrounds. When the weather was good you all cooked out, and you slept under the stars, and you got up with the birds to greet the rising sun, mugs of steaming coffee in your hands as you watched the play of colors unfold against the backdrop of the clouds dotting the eastern sky. It was a wonderful vacation except for one thing...it never happened.
You see, the company's business turned down and there had to be layoffs. Because you were making more than anybody else in your part of the factory, they laid you off first.
So you went on unemployment but you couldn't find work, and now even with the unemployment checks your income was only about 60-70% of what it had been. You're hard-working and honest, and you're proud that you've always been able to pay your bills, but now something is going to have to give if you're to maintain your track record while supporting your family.
So you sell the used Jeep in order to get out from under the payments. And then you sell the camping trailer. And you stop buying DVD movies. And you tell your daughter that she can't have the new jeans that all her friends are wearing. And you tell your son that he's just going to have to wait another year for a clunker car, even though his friends are all learning to drive and buying clunker cars of their own.
And so on. Income is 65% of previous so now you get expenses down to 65% of previous. Except that unemployment is going to run out in a few weeks. Luckily you do finally find a job - - but it only pays 50% of what you had been making, and it's the only work you were able to find, because the nation is slipping into recession and now all the factories in town are laying people off.
Good people. Good workers. All with families of good children to support. All in the same position as you. So you cut back even more, but at least you're working. However, your kids are being taunted at school because they're not wearing the latest clothes, and they're not buying the hip CDs, and they haven't seen the movies that everybody else has seen, and they weren't able to go on the class trip to DC, and so on. Suddenly they have become...well...social outcasts, and they are ashamed of their parents.
That's what happens in a recession, if you're lucky. If you're unlucky you will not find even that lower-paying job, and you will lose the house, and the cars, and you will have to move to another city in order to be able to live with your in-laws. Your kids will take jobs at McDonalds, working before school and after school, leaving very little time even for homework, much less for being a kid. They will take those jobs because your in-laws can only put a roof over your head. If you want even mac-and-cheese dinners, the kids will have to work at McDonald's, and you will have to work at K-Mart when they get around to hiring again.
That's not a fun picture so let's go back to something happier. There is no recession, and you're back to being the owner of the payware add-on business. You've been keeping your head above water...
Until the day that the Russian Mafia cracked your license key protection scheme and started getting $3 for themselves while giving you $0, with them making many of the sales that you used to make.
This, folks, is permanent recession for the payware add-on developers. It doesn't take more than a gut feel to see that a reduction in your takehome pay will put extreme financial pressure on you - - because there is no safety net for you, and if things keep up there won't be a safety net for your people either, because after your business folds, they may have trouble finding other kinds of work that will pay enough to keep their families afloat.
By the way, it turned out later that it wasn't the Russian Mafia, it was simply Russian-speaking Al Qaeda supporters from Chechnya. So every $3 that you gave them purchased ten AK-47 bullets, bullets that were fired into innocent women and children.
So all of this is what can happen if you accept "warez" at little or no cost to you. Now maybe you don't care about the human side of this picture. Maybe you have a heart of stone, your attitude can't be changed, and it is in fact "I want the software. Ron Hamilton shouldn't be charging for it. If he insists on charging for it, I want the price to be one that I consider fair, not the one that he considers fair. And if he doesn't do that for me, well, I want the software so I'm going to TAKE it."
Fine. Go ahead and put Ron out of business. This is America, nobody starves, and hardly anybody dies for lack of medical care. But consider this:
If Ron goes under, you will continue to be able to run your Eaglesoft "warez". But that's all there will be, and no freeware design teams are going to be able to come up with new aircraft that begin to compare in quality with what Eaglesoft had been delivering very affordably, because they're all working real jobs and can't give add-on development more than an hour a day. You'll get aircraft, but they won't be high fidelity aircraft.
Not only that, the support that you used to sneakily manage to get for free sometimes, will now be entirely absent or greatly reduced, because the equivalent of the former support people will only be able to give that stuff an hour a day instead of eight or ten or twelve hours a day.
The choice is yours. What's it going be? Piracy? Or honesty?
Mike McCarthy
mike@pcgamecontrols.com
Discuss this
in the Outer Marker message forum
Copyright © 2008 by FlightSim.Com. All Rights Reserved.