Keyclone - $10 or $20?

[Vyndree]

if there were bullshit awards going out, posts like this might win.

Care to elaborate?

not really, it's plain to see.

If you want to have an intelligent conversation, it's usually best not to come out with guns blazing.

That being said, I'm game to start.

I see one side of the coin -- in essence, "Why is someone allowed to charge me extra just because I might make more money?". Well, absolutely. It's a form of discrimination based on perceived income. But let's look a little deeper than that.

This is a personal standpoint -- you're really not losing any functionality from a technical perspective -- you can run multiple WoW windows on the same machine, or you can buy multiple windows to get a SIMILAR functionality cross-computer. But as a human, it makes sense to us from the perspective of the consumer that these two things are the same -- cross-machine and cross-window.

Software licenses are often done per-machine. Why is that? I'm going to assume it's because there really is no way to track "ownership" outside of the actual physical machine, which includes things like IP addresses, MAC addresses, OS keys, hardware configs, and the like. Your hardware is essentially your "identity".

Furthermore, the programming logic required to send keypresses to multiple WINDOWS is totally different than sending it to multiple MACHINES. From a programmer standpoint, that's 2x the work for what the consumer sees as the "same functionality". So in fact, while the CONSUMER sees no "additional value" in purchasing the "same functionality" twice -- it can indeed be thought of as two seperate programs (one codepath: send keypresses to multiple windows on the same OS; one codepath: sending keypresses over a network connection to other computers, who must receive, process, and respond to those communications)

So since it "costs more" from a technical development standpoint, let's look at things from a business standpoint.

If a consumer's computer breaks, how much does it cost, in time, to support the consumer and update to a new computer? What about those of us who regularly reformat our computers? So... if a consumer has more than one computer that's more man-hours required to support them. If you didn't charge per computer, the user with the most computers will be the most "expensive" -- with a likely average of more support-hours required for the same dollar price.


So while we may not like it personally, I can see the reasoning -- both technical and business -- for charging per-computer. Multiple-computer support is more expensive. Initial cost of development for two-codepaths that do "the same thing" is also more expensive. Granted, some consumers won't like the business model or won't want to pay for "the same functionality", but it certainly isn't discriminatory on purpose. It has logical reasoning to support the one-license-per-computer cost.



So I guess I understand Skarlot's perspective -- but you're also thinking in the mode of the free open-source developer mentality thanks to Octopus. You can ignore the business standpoint side of things, because as a free software nobody can DEMAND your time for support (granted, I know it gets annoying -- I get PMs daily for AHK/Octopus/Keyclone support even though I don't use ANY of them!). But it's POSSIBLE as a free-developer that you can ignore the fact that nobody is paying you for your time, therefore you "owe" nobody your time. So taking that long-term-support of the argument out, you just have consumer happiness and perception versus initial coding time. So your decision is weighted to neither side, while keyclone -- as a business who is selling his support time as well as the initial cost of the product -- has to balance 3 things weighing more towards the license-per-computer argument.