Avast - Pirates!
Regarding Daniel Jalkut's article on pirates (Pirates Are Future Customers, April 27, 2007), I would like to say that Pete and I generally agree with his statements. Is pirating software a good thing? Not really, because one direct effect is a loss of reward for the work of the developers. But is it only downside? Probably not. People who pirate your software are at least interested in your software, and are using it. They may not pay for the version they've stolen, but if they like it and depend upon it, they may pay for the next version that comes out, or they may help to popularize it in other ways.
But again, like Daniel, we're not condoning or legitimizing piracy, we're just saying that for a small company in our situation, it's probably not the worst thing that could happen. The worst thing that could happen would probably be if no one were interested in our software, in which case we wouldn't have to worry too much about people stealing it anyway.
Anyway, what we wanted to add to the discussion is that we actually think it's important to put the needs of the legitimate customer before our desire to prevent illegitimate customers from using the software. That is to say, protecting software from piracy is important, but no anti-piracy measure should interefere with the user expierience, or the ability of legitimate users to use the license they've purchased. There are probably some developers who feel they've been burned by piracy more than we have, and so they may disagree, but that's where we stand right now, and for the foreseeable future.
Case in point: Big Robot uses our own licensing system for our products, which we call LicenseBot. LicenseBot will let a user easily export and import their license as a file, making it trivial for them to back up their license in the same way they would back up their documents. Now, if a person wanted to, they could export their license as a file and share it with their friends. There's a social barrier to doing this, because the name and email address of the licensee is embedded in the license file, so anyone else who uses that file will get the original licensee's name and email address, but this is by no means a technical hurdle.
Our view is that what's going to benefit the software ecosystem the most is trust and reciprocity. As developers, we can add trust by not making anti-piracy measures that get in the way of the user experience. And users can reciprocate by purchasing a license if they like the product, and encouraging others who like the product to do the same. That's how the software ecosystem can be made stronger, and that benefits everybody.
