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Eat! What! A crate of Jolt Cola will do fine =P

Personally, I hope it wins too. I guess it might be a workable system for even commercial companies, if the software was free with paid support perhaps. It will be interesting to see how things pan out.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: dArKr3zIn on 2005-03-22 21:19 ]</font>

On 2005-03-22 14:51, symbiote wrote:
Eat! What! A crate of Jolt Cola will do fine =P

Its amusing you should say that.. most coders I know practically live on the stuff (the more ubiquitous red-packaged cola variety though).

Regarding the paid support thing.. I can see this as a viable way of driving down costs for existing software - a cheaper license if you were not given any support whatsoever. If you needed support you'd have to pay for it.

On 2005-03-22 21:23, dArKr3zIn wrote:

On 2005-03-22 14:51, symbiote wrote:
Eat! What! A crate of Jolt Cola will do fine =P

Its amusing you should say that.. most coders I know practically live on the stuff (the more ubiquitous red-packaged cola variety though).

Yeah, over here, the fridge is full of soda, Guru (some energy drink) and Red Rave (another energy drink.) So wrong.

BTW, about Linux, 4 out of the 5 fastest (publicly-known =P) Supercomputing Clusters right now run Linux. I don't think any computer on the top500 runs Windoze, maybe one or two somewhere near #500 =P.

Audio-wise, it's much easier to modify the kernel to make it real-time, or at least prioritize audio, than to try and do the same with XP (or wait for M$ to modify it, which won't happen unless you are one of their multi-million $ clients.) Interface-wise, it's still a bit of a b*tch to code under, whatwith all the different distribs, kernels, X11 servers, windowmanagers, and piling up of sometimes conflicting libraries of time. I tend to prefer the BSD model on that front, but would happily welcome any Linux-based solution/system/spaceship.

If Linux ever arrives to be like our today main OS, well, the main OS will take the place of Linux and Linux the "money business one". Where there's large amounts of money, there's greedy people behind it.

I can't forecast Linux as the winner, unfortunately...

I dunno, Linux has a couple of big player behind it now, notably IBM and HP/Novell. Once M$ start lacing DRM heavily into Windoze, people will start moving in flock to Linux/BSD, and the software market will most probably follow.

Right now, the situation is, people don't move to Linux because of the lack of applications/support, and companies don't port their applications to Linux because there's no market =P.

I think there´s a problem about pricing of software:
A majority of companies will hardly be able to estimate how many copies of their software will really be sold. So they calculate their prices to compensate the cost of development within a certain timespan, like 6 months or so... then again, it might be the case that the piece of software sells like 4 times as often in those 6 months, and for twice or triple the calculated timespan. But the issue is: they can´t give away the software as soon as the dev. cost is covered, and they can´t even chop down the prices that much, either, cuz the earlier clients would then feel betrayed and lose faith in that company.
This difficulty about estimating the sales in advance for proper price calculation got worse with the tremendous numbers of cracked version users in the past years, too. But after all, isn´t it the crazy pricing of good software that creates those many illegal users in the first place...?
I don´t think I have a final answer to the pricing issue, and honestly, I wouldn´t ever want to be responsible for such decisions either.

I remember once when 3D StudioMax went to half price from one day to the other... : There were many complains about it... The price was something amazingly expensive, around $20.000!!!, and came back to $10.000!!! Madness... those who bought a copy the day before, were completely angry and wnated to understand how they could do such a drop. This is historial.

On 2005-03-23 14:17, JoeKa wrote:
...But after all, isn´t it the crazy pricing of good software that creates those many illegal users in the first place...?

not at all - it's a certain attitude of ignorant, careless, self centered, inconsequent minds - a sign of the times.

like this one: lots of people in germany currently complain about workers dropping in from the east, doing jobs for lower wages

the same people considered it completely normal to buy half of the Spanish isle of Mallorca or make cheapo holidays - or have their teeth repared for polish or czech dentist fees ...

cheers, Tom

uhm, tom... I don´t really think the ones complaining about foreign workers are the same people that could afford a house on mallorca. plus: isn´t this quite a far fetched comparison regarding the topic of this thread?
and btw, I know of spanish people that come here to get their teeth fixed cuz in spain, dentists are even more expensive than here in germany. just mentioning...

of course the example is far fetched - intentionally, as to show how widespread this attitude is.
In fact it's so common that it's become almost unnoticed...

and of course a regular German worker in the 70/80s could easily afford a house in Spain - before those locations became hip...
A price of 25-50k Euro wasn't uncommon, which itself was a typical figure for life insurances, which at least 2 third of the group in question qualified for.

but I consider this exactly focused on the topic that you assumed high prices would lead to the whatsoever kind of illegal use of software

some people cr*ck software for fun, but another group uses the 'result of the sport' as a convenient way of self service and for a personal monetary advantage.

I know a number people (from my times in a shop) with a more than average income, who freely admit they use the software of 'someone else'.

cheers, Tom

look at the price of gasoline, alchohol and tobacco.