To put that in perspective: R650 is a basic grocery shop for my small family for a week.
I have a day job, a baby under a year old, another kid reaching teenagerdom and a bootstrapped startup. My wife works part time.
I wish more startups and even more mature companies would build in some sort of currency sensitive sliding scale for their pricing models. I know what a ball ache pricing is and how much time we tend to spend on it already but I'd love to be able to support and often times the reality is that I simply cannot afford to... Because of the exchange rate.
I take issue with your suggestion that people like myself piss off and use OSS though and I take issue with it for one simple reason: I personally use the 'nag screen version' of Sublime. I'm crazy about the product and when I have a row of developers working on a product that's paying the bills then rest assured - I'll be buying those licenses. In the mean time people see me using it, I evangelize the app fairly regularly, etc.
I know the Sublime guys are trying to earn a living, we all are, and I think that having more users of any kind will ultimately lead to more users of the paying kind.
Where exactly did you bought your moral high-standing? Was it cheap?
In that manner, more people could afford to buy a program and the developer could probably earn more income.
That said, I purchased Sublime Text, but I mostly use vim, because my brain is not wired for modeless editing :).
"Sublime Text may be downloaded and evaluated for free, however a license must be purchased for continued use."
http://www.sublimetext.com/buy
You could of course argue the finer points, but you know if you've passed the "evaluation stage."
The developers could quite easily have implemented a counter of some kind should they wish to implement a limit and I certainly would feel no ill will were they to do that at some stage.
I, for one, given my circumstances, am very glad they they have left it open as they have - had I 70$ to chuck at it, I certainly would. When I do, I will.
Probably a few more sales, but at the cost of forcing some current users to stop using their product (if they can't afford the full version yet), or waste time jumping through anti-DRM hoops -- I've known people who are constantly setting their computer clock back, or tinkering with the Windows registry, or... all kinds of silly things so they can keep using an expired trial version of some software.
If they can keep those users on the trial version (and earn some goodwill as well for their flexibility), eventually some of them will be in a better financial or mental situation (whichever variable needs to change!) and will pay the license fee.
If they start the user down the path of battling DRM, or being forced to stop using their software, in either case they're starting a conflict.
So it's a business (and human) decision; they want to stay on your side even if you are pushing their internal definition of "continued use".
Spoken like a guy that hasn't discovered that the internet is global, and that $70 dollars can be your monthly salary (or very near it) in some places.
Disclaimer: "World" in the above statement refers to parts of the earth map which are not occupied by North America and old Europe. ;)
IP is an abstraction. We don't all subscribe to it.
Please do not take away from this comment that I don't think devs should get paid.
Take the US for example.
Slavery was the law back in the day.
Segregated buses, hotels, restaurants and housing areas for blacks and whites was also the law, just 50 years ago.
Death penalty is still the law today.