Comment by mark_integerdsv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mark_integerdsv | Hacker News Reader

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mark_integerdsv

70 US Dollar equals 643.45 South African Rand.

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.

I know it's hard to implement and people will abuse it, but I always thought it would be nice if registration fees are per country or region, maybe scaled to the median income.

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 :).

ST2 has vintage mode (modal). It's not perfect, but it's something.

What's wrong with using the OSS stuff? It's free and that's the price that you want to pay. If more people used the OSS stuff, and helped to improve it then we'd all be better off. By stealing paid software, you aren't helping anyone but yourself. Even simply using the software and asking questions helps to build up the knowledge base. e.g.

http://stackoverflow.com/tags/emacs

http://askubuntu.com/

Whoa! I don't remember saying that there is anything wrong with OSS products and I'm fairly certain that clicking 'Later' instead of 'Buy Now!' on Sublime Text's nag screen does not constitute stealing... Am I wrong here?

How many times do you have to click "Later" before it becomes "continued use?"

"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."

My feeling is that the terms are deliberately open to definition.

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.

If they put a hard limit on "continued use", what would it achieve?

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".

People will always justify this sort of thing - hopefully your startup won't be abused in a similar manner.

Justify what sort of thing? Using the nag version, which is his full and total right? And being from a place of relative poorness, where the asking price is equivalent to $400 dollars?

Where exactly did you bought your moral high-standing? Was it cheap?

I had hoped to get across that I'm really not abusing the developers of this product. Please correct me if I have misunderstood but not converting to a full fledged customer from a Shareware customer (yet-dictated by circumstances) and with every intention of doing so as soon as I am generating income with the software ...does not a pirate make. Have I missed a beat here?

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