Dave Winer and Evan Williams commented that the people who shout the loudest are often the ones who have no basis for their anger. I’m reminded of this fact by an email I received this morning. Here’s a quote:
“Fix your piece of s— program! I upgraded to FeedDemon 1.10 and it crashes with ‘Win32 device error.’ Did you even test this s—?”
I’ve actually received a number of emails (and one forum post) about this bug, but I have no plans to fix it. Why? Because the error message only appears if you upgrade a cracked version of FeedDemon 1.0. This is a deliberate error message that FeedDemon 1.10 displays when it detects that you upgraded from a specific cracked version of FeedDemon 1.0.
That’s right, people who use a pirated version of FeedDemon are emailing me for support. It never ceases to amaze me when people not only steal from me, but also expect me to spend my time answering their questions. And more often than not, the email I’ve received about this problem reads like something a drunk teenager would write.
I’ve written about piracy before and I’m not planning to start another lengthy rant. But I do have a request for those who have justified their use of cracked versions of my work: don’t ask for support. I support my family with sales of my software, and my life is affected – dramatically – by the existence of cracks. Please, if you’re using a pirated version of my software, don’t expect me to help you.
I’d be tempted to hose their bios or rewrite their fat randomly.
Best Thing I’ve Read All Day
Nick Bradbury, creator of the brilliant FeedDemon, writes about a known issue in the latest release of said software, and why he’s not going to fix it.
Funny read, but seriously, Nick, I would consider lowering the price of FD a bit. I liked loved …
FeedDemon Crack fights back
a funny post by FeedDemon publisher http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2004/06/feeddemon_crack.html I’ve actually received a number of emails (and one forum post) about this bug, but I have no plans to fix it. Why? Because the error message only appears if y…
Frankly, I SUPPORT people who cracked your software — who are you to have this sense of entitlement over controlling who’s able to use it? You can try to stop Digital Pirates like me, but you will FAIL – every time, brotha! Just keep on flailing away though, it’s fun to watch! LOL
I enjoy obtaining software for free, and therefore, I’ll download as much as I please!
Loosers like “Digital Pirate” in the previous post are the types that will ultimately kill the small coders.
Nick started out with Homesite, a OUTSTANDING free program that was swallowed up by a heartless/souless corporate giant, thus ending the inspiration, simplicity and overall useability of Homesite.
Leaving software design up to the giants will result in limited innovation. Hackers (aka loosers) will always find a way to hack the programs. It’s a game, how many hacked programs do they have as compared to their little friends and showing off their “skillz” in breaking code. Fact is that most of these loosers only suceed in pushing the small legit coders out of business due to saturation by cracked versions of their wares. The remaining survivors become smart and only sell boxed versions, or truly crippled (not code crippled) versions as demos with the full version as a boxed version. Doesn’t stop the loosers from breaking the code, just slows it down considerably.
Best bet is for the developer to make the program require a routine “update” from the website so that they can constantly change the code weeding out the loosers. With the ‘net becoming a staple everywhere you turn the inconvienence of this over keeping the program up-to-date and protecting thier investment outweighs most concerns. Remember the uproar over the Microsoft Updates? Now it’s common place and barely thought of anymore.
Good luck Nick… ignore the loosers!!
I’m torn here, because I’m all too aware that very large companies (I’m thinking of Adobe here) essentially tolerate piracy to some degree, in part by using relatively weak copy protection.
Why is that the case? Well, if you want to become a graphic designer, then you need to know how to use Illustrator and Photoshop. (Throw in Quark or PageMaker/InDesign for DTP or pre-press.) Putting ‘Fluent in GIMP and Paint Shop Pro’ on your resume isn’t going to impress anyone: you need experience with the real thing. And while the price for these applications has dropped, it’s still almost as expensive as a new PC.
So, Adobe prices its software, for the most part, to reflect the purchasing power of office environments or small businesses, in which software is: a) subject to audit; and b) more easily written off at the end of the tax year as a necessary business expense. Adobe knows this, of course; and it knows that one of the best ways to ensure a steady stream of people with experience and ability using its products is to tolerate some degree of piracy. Yes, it’s theft. But in another sense, it’s like the free hit from a drug dealer.
(And if you don’t think so, ask the graphics/print people who use PageMaker/Freehand/Quark/Photoshop etc as part of their work whether they learned their skills by paying full price.)
But that’s a very different paradigm: those who crack $30 shareware for ‘fun’ really are taking food from the table of developers.
Ник Брэдбери, автор FeedDemon рассказывает,
Ник Брэдбери, автор FeedDemon рассказывает, как к нему обращаются за саппортом владельцы пиратских копий программы.That’s right, people who use a…
A day in a program pirates life.
The pirate works for hours and weeks and is really proud when his swimmingpool finally is ready. When he wakes up next morning he can´t think of anything to take a dip in his new pool. Arriving in his newly bought swimshorts he found a bunch of strangers in his pool. Angry he shouts, what the heck do you do in MY pool. This I have built with my own sweat and I don´t wan´t any freeloaders here. A man in the pool answer him calmly that, Hey, this pool just lying here for everybody to see and we thought it could be nice with a dip. But it is my pool and I have spent weeks of hard working to finish it and btw how did you pass the gate it was locked. The man in the pool answered him that it was no problem to fix a key if you had the right connections. But you can’t expect me to let you use my pool with out my permission and not paying for it… the pirate said.
I don´t know if this is a relevant history but something like that if you wan´t to put it in perspective.
I don´t think these people who fix a cracked version of a program understand how much time, sweat, sometimes nights and how much effort it can be to write a program.
I have been working with programming and I know for sure, that often you have spend hours, weeks and months to write and test a program. So 30 bucks for a program seems to me cheap and I think the programmer is fully entitled to this money.
R Blair, I don’t understand where you’re coming from. The FeedDemon beta was open to anyone, and thousands of people downloaded it. It simply wasn’t possible to give a discount to anyone who commented. I did, however, give free copies to the most active testers.
Your comment about me not even thanking beta testers is wrong. I thanked testers both in my release announcement in this blog, and also within the newsgroups.
“Digital Pirate,” I’ll take the bait. I have no misguided hopes of thinking I can stop piracy. But I do hope that I can cut down on the needless support costs caused by freeloading crack users such as yourself.
I have to add, of course, that you appear to be the one with a false sense of entitlement. I’m not trying to stop people from using my work – I’m just asking them to pay for it. You, on the other hand, think you’re entitled to steal because you can do it without getting caught.
Most “kewl” kiddies such as yourself eventually get older and wiser and realize that ethics isn’t about what you can get away with – it’s about doing what you believe is right. A few years down the road when you accept this fact, I’ll still be here writing software. So, feel free to send me an email apologizing for being such a blathering idiot when you were younger.
FeedDemon theft
FeedDemon theft: This thread at Nick Bradbury’s place is almost a week old, but is still drawing replies. The part that particularly caught my eye is how, in addition to his spending time reading BS “I’m angry” messages, Nick and…
There’s always the excellent “Bloglines” – http://www.bloglines.com/
Jumping back to the error message subject..
My first thought was to bring up a fake “now formatting drive C” prompt but
even more fun. Introduce a memory leak to a cracked version…
Fix your piece of s— program!
Nick Bradbury berichtet über Leute, die sich di…
Frech oder dumm?
Bei Johannes gefunden: Der Autor des Programms FeedDemon berichtet von Leuten, die entweder extrem frech oder äußerst dumm sind - oder auch beides:
That's right, people who use a pirated version of FeedDemon are emailing me for support. It …
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FeedDemon crack
Crack para FeedDemon
Jajaja! realmente muy gracioso el post de Nick Bradbury, creador de FeedDemon (uno de los mejores lectores de feeds para escritorio Windows) en los que hace alusión lo siguiente
recuerdo que el e-mail que recibi esta mañana decia:
R…