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There's something to be learned from that model, as well. What makes users want to pay for something instead of use a free/open alternative? From my experience,

by law 16y ago

There's something to be learned from that model, as well. What makes users want to pay for something instead of use a free/open alternative? From my experience, it's ease of use. Users don't want to waste time, so they try to find the quickest way to the solution. It's immaterial whether that means pirating software instead of going through the hurdles of purchasing and registering it or buying software with free/open alternatives with a higher learning curve. It seems like the most important factor is the time it takes to solve a problem.

HerraBRE 16y ago
I think generally people want solutions to whatever problems they have (boredom may be considered a problem, thus paying for entertainment). How acute and urgent the problems are determines what people are willing to pay - whether they pay with money or with time invested depends on their situation. So yes, people trade money for the luxury of not having to learn how to use a complicated FOSS tool. But note that as a business, your revenue in this case doesn't depend on lock-in, it depends on making things easier. You could in many cases distribute your stuff under the GPL (to your customers only, nobody says you have to distribute it to everyone) and still keep the same customers. Making your product worse through anti-features like DRM and copy protection ultimately just gives any competition a clear opportunity to be obviously better than you by simply not doing work. If you have no competition or your product is vastly superior to the alternatives, then anti-features may help you extract more money out of your existing customers, in the short term. But they're not going to like you for it and clever consumers will avoid you entirely because they don't want to be locked in. On the other hand, if you are an underdog with limited resources, I'd wager you'd usually be far better off spending the time/money on marketing and giving your customers what they want, than on implementing copy protection at all.

by law 16y ago

HerraBRE 16y ago

I think generally people want solutions to whatever problems they have (boredom may be considered a problem, thus paying for entertainment). How acute and urgent the problems are determines what people are willing to pay - whether they pay with money or with time invested depends on their situation. So yes, people trade money for the luxury of not having to learn how to use a complicated FOSS tool. But note that as a business, your revenue in this case doesn't depend on lock-in, it depends on making things easier. You could in many cases distribute your stuff under the GPL (to your customers only, nobody says you have to distribute it to everyone) and still keep the same customers. Making your product worse through anti-features like DRM and copy protection ultimately just gives any competition a clear opportunity to be obviously better than you by simply not doing work. If you have no competition or your product is vastly superior to the alternatives, then anti-features may help you extract more money out of your existing customers, in the short term. But they're not going to like you for it and clever consumers will avoid you entirely because they don't want to be locked in. On the other hand, if you are an underdog with limited resources, I'd wager you'd usually be far better off spending the time/money on marketing and giving your customers what they want, than on implementing copy protection at all.