Navaho Gunleg

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have now got an Apple MacBook Pro to work on, which obviously has its pros and cons. Sure, the machine supports X11 to a certain extent but I don’t want to basically run 2 different window managers that look and act a bit differently. I have been working on Linux machines for over a decade now and one of the major drawbacks of having a mainstream operating system is that everyone that writes an application or utility for it wants to sell it. You search for something, you think you find it because you read a good review or something and end up on a page where you can download a crippled piece of software.

Nope, it doesn’t seem enough anymore that somebody else even wants to try your software — no, people have to pay to get an un-crippled, functional application.

I don’t mind people making an honest buck, but the crippling of functionality seem like mob-extortion practices to me.

And it’s really starting to become an annoyance… again (hence this rant). It seems that money is more important than showing off what you can do. Back when I was a kid, it was fun to write software and share it with people I knew. The idea that somebody else was using my software or playing my game was cool — somebody else that would think ‘Wow this is a great, I’m glad he wrote this‘.

Now people are like, ‘I’m a l33t coder — gimme gimme gimme and you get this fine application without crippled functionality.‘, before you have actually started using the program. (And everything being released as a binary, it’s pretty hard to find out if they actually wrote it themselves and didn’t steal logic from known Open Source projects. Being I’m Dutch, I don’t think I would even want to pay up $20 to attempt to find out.)

Man, didn’t you write that utility or program because you wanted the functionality yourself? People downloaded and used your program and have possibly sent you bug-reports, feature requests and new ideas. And then, suddenly, your great free program turns into a cock-teasing prostitute that knows what the users want and you depend on the fact that a few people that have taken it for a lap-dance will pay up for the complete job — just showing enough to make the average guy horny.

No wonder there are guys (and girls) out there that crack that type of software. To continue the analogy in the previous paragraph, that isn’t rape, the software is asking for it.

No, today it seems that the crackers are the really smart guys out there. At least, they unconditionally release their tools — for their own egos or whatever. If the ego of any author of a cracked application was just as equally pleased he wouldn’t have had to lock-up his piece of software to begin with.

But relax, I wouldn’t use a cracked version of your program anyway — there’s no love, man — I’d only make love to a woman that actually wants to, for free.