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Comment by dools | Hacker News Reader

Is there not a way of giving your app away for free, and then encouraging users to setup some sort of subscription or purchase from within the app if they like it? People regularly provide voluntary financial support (tips, street performers)when it's easy and they see benefit.

Unless the ev1l pirat0rs actually compiled a different version of your app in order to give it away for free without those messages (which seems unlikely given there's absolutely no incentive for them to do so) you'd make a pretty penny through the sheer volume of users.

Imagin busking to an audience of 1 million people, all equidistant from your guitar case with one dollar in their hand?

The scale at which digital distribution allows piracy is the same thing that will make you money: you have free distribution to millions of people, just figure out a way for them to voluntarily give you money and you'll be sorted.

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That's a perfectly fine choice for an artist to make.

If they do not want to do that, and instead would like each person who takes a copy of their work to pay for it, is that not also a choice they should have? Your choice as a consumer should then be to either pay that person for a copy, or not take a copy and move on.

Nobody is arguing that giving away music isn't a viable model for success - simply that it's not ethical to make that choice on behalf of content creators.

I find that to be sort of like saying I'm a shop owner. My life would be shitloads easier if I didn't have to actually be there, and people could just put the money on the counter and make their own change (like clerks :)

You're being an idealist - be more pragmatic and you'll live a life less angry.

I may only be speaking for myself here, but I honestly think the law will take a century to catch up here. We're on the frontier - with all the advantages and disadvantages that come with it (one advantage being, for example, the lack of any sort of regulation or licensing getting in the way of being a developer).

You're comparing a shop owner who doesn't want to protect their investment because they're lazy to an artist who cannot prevent their product from being taken without being paid for, unless they want to make it unavailable in the format that all of their customers want it in.

It's just sad that asking people to pay for things they take is being an idealist. I'm not angry. I just prefer to speak out against it than act like there's nothing wrong with it.

It's not so much that wanting people to pay is being an idealist, but that wanting things to be some way other than way they clearly are is being an idealist.

In another, less sophisticated time, you would have found a reality not far removed from the shop owner I described - and they would not have been considered lazy.

But a shop owner who railed against the shifting sands of humanity, pining for simpler times lost as he was pilfered blind, would clearly be sorrowful idealist.

I'm good with this, if you and everyone else who believe this also agrees that if I use your source code in my proprietary app (no matter the license), it's just the "shifting sands of humanity".

I think this point of the argument has been unfortunately lost in the kerfuffle over whether charging for apps (or app installs, to split hairs) is a viable business model.

It should be fine for a developer (or musician, or other creator of content) to charge for their wares. If the app being available really is valueless or if the prospective customer doesn't believe it's worth what's being asked, they are free to move along and select a different product or to develop their own. I'm not sure why this concept is so looked down upon.

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