There have recently been a lot of discussions about the value of software and about things like MacHeist or MacZot, or other software-giveaway things. Something i’d like to talk about in this post is the value of freeware software and the time invested in it.
I’m going to talk about one of the many causes of software monopolies, which are closed file formats. We all know that if an application can generate data that no other application can understand, the user will be forced to stick with said application if he happened to do some work it. What are the problems of this?
It seem pretty obvious that this kind of locking is a good way to instaurate a monopoly, you can just look at Microsoft Office for an example. The other problem is obsolescence. What happens if you use a product from a company to do your work, stored in a closed file format and the company closes? You can just stick using the product you bought with no problems, but you have no guarantee that it will work on later computers and soon or later you will just have to redo your work.
As an user of software product, you should try your best to use software which uses open and well documented formats to store data. I know this is not what you usually look for when you buy software, but hey, it will come to (y)our favour.
As developers, what should we do? If our applications are going to produce some kind of content i think we should document the file structures we are going to use to store it. Either that, or use an existing open format (which would be the best option, but not always possible).
Also, a big advantage of using a documented file format, even when you wrote that documentation, is that you are less likely to screw up in the implementation because you have a reference to work with. I’m assuming you document the file format BEFORE using it, which is the way you should do anyways. Also important: code is no documentation. I know of some open source applications who claim they use open file formats because you can figure out from the implementation. That’s not true, when no documentation is provided a format is still closed, no matter how many different implementations you have access to.
But there is another entity which in my opinion should regulate these issues. Maybe is too early, but i think governments should force interoperability and the use of open file formats with laws. I know we all dislike government control, but it controls many aspect of our life and business. Computer business should not be any different and some regulations would advantage small companies which currently cannot emerge.
These days there have been long discussions about the MacHeist bundle and its effects on the involved developers. For the few that still don’t know what the MacHeist bundle is, it is a collection of applications sold at an extremely discounted price.
Here is my take on it. I’m not going to talk wether MacHeist offered or not a good deal to developers. Lets pretend MacHeist offered a good deal. The real damage is to the perceived value of the involved software after the promotion ends. If it can be sold for few dollars, its worth a few dollars! Will the developers still be able to sell said software at regular price at the same rate they did before the promotion? Or will user start complaining it is too expensive? I hope the answers are (in order) yes and no, but i have my reasonable doubts.
Unfortunately this doesn’t affect only the involved software, but the whole independent mac software scene, especially because the software involved (this surprised me a lot) was already pretty famous and some even won awards! I think we should avoid depreciating our software with these kind of offers or we’ll soon be forced to do it constantly. This is also diseducative, if you remember my post about software piracy, my point was that we must teach user that software HAS a value, not the opposite.
This said, i don’t want to say these kind of promotion is inherently bad. Offering your 1.0 (or otherwise not popular) application on sites like MacZOT for 1 day at discounted price should cause no harm, the promotion of a new product is something we are used to. What is to avoid is the continuos depreciation of software, especially if it is already well known.
Like every developer blog worth of this name, it needs an article on software piracy. This is going to be rather long. I’ll start by talking about the causes of software piracy, its effects and what we can (and cannot) do to limit its damages.
Today I tested Tangerine! a tool to generate iTunes playlists.
Well generating playlists doesn’t make it special yet, but the way Tangerine! is doing it, does! Tangerine! is generating the playlists based on the beats per minute of each song. So if you’re jogging and listen to music from your iPod, you may never again listen to a song that is way to slow for you. Try it out, it just rocks and is absolutely easy to use!