In the past 10 years or so, I’ve wrote several software applications in my spare time.
Some of them I’ve released as freeware/open source/giftware: they’re mostly applications I wrote because I needed them and I felt that other might find them useful too.
It also happened that I developed other pieces of software with a different goal in mind: to make some money. Everyone’s got to earn one’s income one way or the other.
I don’t expect people to agree with me on the price I ask for these applications or to be happy to pay for them, and I’m ready to listen to any constructive critic. I just don’t tolerate the lack of respect for someone’s work (especially if that someone is me :-)).
In the past week I’ve received a couple of mails about TabView that crossed this boundary (or got very close to).
The first ended up directly in my “ignored” mail folder. It didn’t deserve anything better. But let me quote a paragraph of that poem:
Fuck you and your shitty tab program..I was excited to learn a song and of course some STUPID WINDOW pops up for me to PAY for this..ARE YOU KIDDING.WHAT! THE ! FUCK!…You are such greedy fucks and all you care about is making more money. I’m a young musician WITH NO CREDIT CARD YOU FUCKING RETARDS. HOW THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO USE TABS ON MY MAC THAT I JUST SPENT $1500 ON. yOu ingorant bastards. I was feeling very inspired for my guitar playing about 5 minutes ago now im ANGRY.
Perhaps he should have spent $500 on a Dell notebook and saved some money for the software? I’m also curious where those $1500 come from, as apparently the concept of working to earn some money seems alien to the guy.
At least the second mail was nicer and with a bit of humour:
Dudes,
[…] if you were cool, you’d make it free too, cause you’d be cooler if you did.
Sorry, pal. If I had to make it free, I would abandon it too.
Please, if you’re going to write useless rants, at least make me laugh 🙂
But isn’t your PowerTab app a port of a Windows app? If you used someone elses freely released source code for this, it really should be free.
I’m all for making some cold, hard cash.. but this isn’t how you go about it.
No, it’s not a porting at all: if it were that simple, I would totally agree with you.
Only the source code for a parser for PowerTab files is available: it’s not a complete application (not even close to one). It’s more or less the part of code that allows you to read the file from disk.
On top of that, you need to write *a* *lot* of code to transform the data you’ve read into a graphical representation (i.e. something you can actually see). Then another lot of code to implement a MIDI player/exporter or any other useful feature you might think of.
The sources for the parser have been available for a couple of years but nobody used them to create anything useful before, simply because it’s not an easy job.