[cheat-master30]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

You have made your point, now may I?

1. Why the hell is everything for money now?
   We must make a living, you, me, everybody. It rarely will happen a multi-milionaire to be a programmer willing to make small and big additions for free. This always has been like this, and since I remember, only old software was given for free or as a trial. The idea of Open Source was wrongly taken as Freeware = software of free and completely unpaid use. While the latter may work for Multinationals like IBM, it is the definite death of smaller companies and single developers. Strangely Open Source was enforced by the large companies, right in the view to absorb (= kill and at best employ) the small developers. Please try to make a living of coding only, and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Erm... I was comparing to the days gone by a bit and how it seems when something is free there are more volunteers rather than people demanding money for everything. Of course, I'm not sure what people think about the open source licenses that basically say any use of the code must also be free as with anything that integrates with the code, it basically says 'tough luck, no charging for anything related to this product'. Then again, I've seen quite a few sites with a really nice idea, anything submitted to them that gets abandoned by the author gets moved to a section where anyone who wants to can update/finish it in their own time. Basically, the audience gets to finish those things left unfinished by the original authors, which is pretty much the use of reuseable code.

1. Lite does not equal feature non existant
   Many times, a light version is identical to the "extended" versions, but the way how customers and requests are handled are different. Paying customers have priority support, and can ask for features which may eventually never become published. Usually, paying customers are much more happy with a product than the free fellows, because they get also a service. Freeware is like an ambulance with no driver. Paid software has not only a driver, but also a doctor on board. Many customers prefer the latter.

By that, I mean REALLY light version. As in for your ambulance example, no driver, three wheels and no brakes. As in, I understand fully the whole idea of no support, just that in these cases there's no just no support, the product is so lacking it's basically:

1. Nearly completely unusable for the purpose of the modification. Lite enough to make even the basic 3.7 album system that's constantly been criticised for this look as feature rich as vBulletin itself.
2. It's basically a great big advertisement saying 'buy the paid product' on a free website that doesn't allow paid products. Think of it like those people who might post three lines from a paid article and then say underneath 'to read the rest of this article go to mysite.com and pay ?999.99'.

Seriously, these kinds of mods are really pushing the rules here to the limit in terms of near uselessness. At this rate, it'd wouldn't surprise me to see time limited 'Lite versions' now and people getting moderated for it.

1. Encryption? What the hell?
   Right. Encryption is a mod killer. but it is also the only ensurance the customer has not messed with the code and therefore there is no excuse for both sides. You can't imagine how often it happens to hear: "Oops, sorry, I have made a small change here ... does it matter?". Of course it does. I have wasted many days on searching for errors where they haven't been. But you're right, too, the code should be in clear text. What is missing to PHP is a "No Mess Lock", or an automatic warrant system, which tells a coder the source has been tampered with.

I'd like some system like that, except just displays a great big message saying that it was 'altered by a user' when there's an error or something.

1. Custom Coding costs thousands of dollars/pounds...
   Yes, but thousands, not hundreds of thousands. It depends also if you want crap or quality. I want to recall that a top-gun developer rarely writes more than a few hundred lines of code daily, and sometimes sits on a single line for many days. But that code will still work when all other software has stopped. Two third of my customers have paid 3-8 times as much as if they had called a professional first.

I'm not criticising the cost of custom coding. Just saying the pricing model isn't transferrable to off the shelf software.

1. Piracy forces encryption!
   No. Pirates have always existed and will be able to obtain the code if they really want. Good code will always be pirated, and there is no measure to avoid this, except for frequent updates. In fact this is the best existing anti-piracy strategy. If they had to update weekly, they quickly would give up - too much work for nothing

--------------- Added 13 Oct 2008 at 01:05 ---------------

Erm... I wasn't backing that piracy enforces encryption, I was attacking a common argument that would probably (and has) been given in this topic before it came up.

Sorry, but I couldn't resist

We aren't ordinary fans - all posts I have read here are coming from professionals or at least upcoming coders and designers. We are the film-makers, and you are watching our movie and hate to pay for it [/quote]

The point still stands. You don't need 'expertise' to criticise anything. It's a very similar argument to saying 'only a scientist can criticise scientific knowledge' or what not. Saying 'I'd like to see you do better' and expecting that because someone cannot do better at whatever means they're wrong is a fallacy. You don't need to know how to make movies to say how a movie sucks, or know economics to say that there are unfair business decisions or various other stuff. Sometimes I really wish vBulletin would have a 'no use of code in paid deriative works' addition to their terms of service to stop much of this.