[merk_aus]

Ok can I just say i may get flammed for this however would like to agree with certain points the OP has said - however also agree with all of the coders with some points they have brought up.

I agree that coders/developers have lives and families and that stuff is not free, you need to pay for electricity, food, petrol etc please do not get me wrong I definatly agree with all of that and have no issues with you guys charging some cash to earn enough to pay for those items.

I do agree that some addons do seem over priced - however with the amount of work that goes into them i do agree that they deserve to charge for items. The one thing that really annoys me is the fact that a coder releases "Lite" version of their products.

You install it - and it seems perfect for your forums - whether your trying to make money through your forums or not - you go to the developers/coders website (as they do not support their lite versions only premium) and want to pay for the premium version - but to do that you need to first buy membership - so after uming and aarring you buy membership, you then purchase the script hoping that your forums are going to take off now that you have the full version of it - however you go to install and there is a line of code missing etc and the mod doesnt work.

so you trek back to the developers website and its completly dead - no new posts - you log in and all of a sudden you can not post, you submit support tickets and nothing. I could sit here and rattle of a number of mods that this has happened with but am not here to start arguements.

I agree with the OP about the encryption - HOLD ON A SECOND AND READ - I completly agree that developers/coders should be able to protect their work, and stand behind them 100% - however I do not like licensing systems - where my website has to communicate with their site to keep the mod working - i do not like the idea of that because if something does happen to their website etc this mod is useless.