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A while back a friend of mine told me he installed a 'clean my Mac' application, thought it was decent and went looking for a crack. So the story went - the top
by iamben 9y ago
A while back a friend of mine told me he installed a 'clean my Mac' application, thought it was decent and went looking for a crack. So the story went - the top link was one to their own website with full instructions on how to crack the app - something like - www.appname.com/how-to-crack-appname/, or whatever.
On the page was complete and detailed instructions on how to crack it yourself using a hex editor or decompiler (or whatever!). Except, he said as you read down, the way the author explained it really highlighted how much effort he put into making it, and at the bottom copy saying something like "we hope this was useful and avoids you using a crack which might damage your machine, we also hope you realise the effort that goes into making software and will consider paying just $xx dollars which goes towards feeding my family and making more software".
Friend was so impressed he just got out his card and bought it.
TL;DR - They embraced the piracy / understood those that won't pay never will, those that may can be persuaded, so made something educational and thoughtful out of it.
Hope you figure it out!
- qualitytime 9y agoThats a great story and thumbs up to the app makers you mention.
- ttoinou 9y agoYes I might do that in the future, I have to be the first google result of "MyProduct Crack" ;) But if the official author of the plugin gives it for free it sends a weird message to paying customers, no ?
- dasil003 9y agoWell you wouldn't link it from your main site nav, it would just be for people searching for the crack directly. If people find it that way then you have to assume they're at least on the fence and are likely to pirate anyway.
- iamben 9y agoFrom an SEO standpoint I don't think it would be too hard to rank for that :-) I guess the whole point was not to give it for free, but to make someone realise that they could get it for free with X hours work and learning. But most people are too lazy - those determined to steal will do it anyway, and those that can be converted to pay you've given yourself a platform to get them to understand why they should.
- chx 9y agoEven when I had like three different claims to a free PhpStorm license as a top Drupal contributor to 7 and 8 and also as someone who writes some PHP documentation I was still paying for it because great software deserves to be paid.
- iamben 9y agoI hear ya. Someone once told me (I don't sell software/music/whatever so have no idea if this is true) - for every 5 people, 2 will always pay, 1 will always pirate, and the 2 will buy if given good reason (be that price point, sales pitch, ease, guilt, etc.).
- danieltillett 9y agoThat is rather generous of human nature. My experience is out of every 100 people 99 will pirate and 1 will always pay.
- cm2187 9y agoIn most large corporations, using pirated software is a breach of internal policy and possibly a fireable offense. It is unlikely they would violate the license even if it easy to do. Getting a large corporation to buy software from you is another matter. I tried to push my IT dept to buy licenses for libraries I liked, even with a modest cost, unsuccessfully.
- Aeolun 9y agoProbably because IT shouldn't have control over Dev related purchases. Unfortunately it seems very few corporations have noticed this fact.
- chrisper 9y agoThis reminds me of https://www.codeux.com/textual/ https://www.codeux.com/textual/ The software is on GitHub (https://github.com/Codeux-Software/Textual https://github.com/Codeux-Software/Textual) and you can compile it yourself and, thus, remove the "you gotta pay" checks and such. If you can do that you are free to do that... or you can just pay for it and don't have to bother. It's not crazy expensive ($5.99), but I decided to go for the former just because it was more fun to me. If I had used his software for much longer and more often, I'd have eventually paid for it, I suppose.