More Paid Tools Please?

[weaver4]

With AutoGK dieing, MPEG Mediator dead, gk dead, DVDD dead I wish that we had more paid tools. I think the motivation would be different if their livelihood depended on them sticking with it.

I would mind paying $29 to $39 for a tool if I knew it would be around for a long time with continuous updates. What say you?

[jggimi]

GK is an open source project; you're welcome to join it and make enhancements and additions.

Moving to General Discussion, since it doesn't fit perfectly in the A(GK) forum.

[influenza]

DVDD dead

That's not exactly a good example. The motivation of the author was not influenced by money as we all know. And he has continued doing good work, giving us imgburn.

I think that for a lot of authors (lack of)time is more important than the money involved.

[weaver4]

That's not exactly a good example. The motivation of the author was not influenced by money as we all know. And he has continued doing good work, giving us imgburn.

I think that for a lot of authors (lack of)time is more important than the money involved.

If it was a full paid postion would he have a "lack of time"? Even if he wanted to move on to new work he could of "paid" someone else to continue to support it.

[LIGHTNING UK!]

"lack of time" ?!

I assume by that comment you didn't actually read about it in the news then. I thought I'd made myself pretty clear in the statement I posted on CDFreaks back in june/july.

[len0x]

If it was a full paid postion would he have a "lack of time"?

He definitely would. Unless he relies on it for day-to-day money making, fully or as a part of larger project/product in which case its sort of his job to continue supporting the program. (btw by "he" I mean a potential developer and not some concrete person)

[Doom9]

Have a good look around this forum.. note all the cheap people not even donating any money for softwares they use on a daily basis. Do you really think those people would pay a dime for commercial ripping software?

[influenza]

"lack of time" ?!

I was not talking about you light ;( I meant that in general it's a out of hand hobby for a lot of developers. So if a project slowly dies or doesn't get updated that much it's because those developers have regular jobs that require more attention.

And like doom9 says it's far from realistic to expect that someone can live off developing a (dvd) ripping tool

[LIGHTNING UK!]

No problem influenza, my comment was aimed at weaver4 - who I think was referring to me ;) (at least on some level!)

[neuron2]

I'll give some perspective if I may. I have a site where I make available underwater video clips of elite swimmers. I get massive downloads, 150GBytes per month. I pay $250 dollars a year for the hosting. So I thought, let's try to at least recover that through donations. So I wrote a sincere plea and I regularly updated the page to show the donations to date. After 6 months, I had gotten $73 dollars after Paypal fees. I was thinking of upgrading the hosting to add about twice as many new videos, faster downloading, the collection of my swimming technical articles, etc. I gave it up and removed the plea. People were not willing to toss a few bucks to something they highly valued, let alone get more of it essentially for free. $5 dollars is not going to break anyone's bank.

Why didn't I charge for access? Simple. I was using the videos under fair use criteria, and I did not want even a hint of making profit from the venture.

Basically, netters are cheap bastards; heck I'm one myself. But I have donated in my own way by hosting my sites and making my tools completely on my free time.

Much earlier, when the micro revolution was starting, I made a collection of Unix-like utilities that ran under CP/M; I even had a shell. I advertised and there was an initial burst of interest -- I made a few hundred dollars. But unless you have a blockbuster application that no-one else has, or which blows away the competitors, you're just going to starve trying make any decent money that way.

[weaver4]

I did not mean to offend anyone. And yes, Light, I am not familiar with your personal situation (but I do appreciate your work). I was thinking about all the small (one person) companies that make components for .Net, sell 4000 of them a year at $30 each and make a living at it. I was also thinking about how pleased I am with AnyDVD (a paid product) and their tireless efforts to make their product better. My favorite converter tool was AutoGK and I could not help to think that a paid model "might" of helped.

My statement was to be a more general statement that "If we paid for tools the average life expectancy would go up; and the hours spend developing the product would probably increase. And more people would enter the market." But then again, maybe I am the only one motivated by money.

[weaver4]

Have a good look around this forum.. note all the cheap people not even donating any money for softwares they use on a daily basis. Do you really think those people would pay a dime for commercial ripping software?

You mean like AnyDVD? Which is $49. I bought it, like many others.

[unmei]

I have this feeling that tools that are good/unique enough that they would make an amount of money that would raise a commercial interest in the author to keep it alive are unlikely to be dropped due to loss of interest by the author.

[len0x]

Personally, I have a different "moral" problem - since AutoGK relies on quite a few brilliant low level free applications, I don't see a smooth way of making it totally commercial (well the only way I can think of - may be a support model when you buy "support" and access to beta versions as well as private forum, but release versions are available for everyone).