The Spanish Inquisitor-ition? Get real!
Anyone who owns a mac and who will participate in flame wars of rabid proportions against software developers who dare ask money for their software or serve ads as an alternative, or, heaven forbid, mix in affiliate links in with served results… I have one challenge for you. Make it yourself. I challenge you to make your own app that doesn’t suck, that droves of people want to use. Then support it, update it… and give it away for free. Free as in FREE… nothing… no money… Could you do it? No? Didn’t think so. Shut your pie hole then.
Dave Watanabe is a stand up guy. For real. He is. A fellow Canadian like myself. I have had many exchanges with him over the years. I own and have paid for every piece of software he distributes and supports and updates regularily. Yes I even paid for Inquisitor back in the beta days. I donated around $20 and will probably do so again in light of all of this ridiculous attention that arose from some ones epiphany that Inquisitor (a brilliant Safari plugin) serves up the odd affiliate ad from time to time. Uh… yeah… there is a company called Google (have you heard of them?) who’s entire business model is based on that principle. So what’s the big deal? I have known about it since day one.
So flame wars are nothing new but what gets me is the personal nature that they take on. Calling Dave the “the biggest asshole in the world” and demanding that his work be stolen and sabotaged? It’s a piece of free software… did it take away from you life somehow? Did it cause you personal damage? Are you irreversibly scarred by the fact that you may or may not have actually been served one of those affiliate links, any more so then being taken to one of the bazillion link farms that Google serves up in their results?
The bottom line is this, if you don’t want to pay for software you can expect one of two things; 1) the support will suck, or 2) the service will be ad supported, or 3) service and support will cost you something. If you don’t like that model, go with Linux… oh… wait a minute… is that a Dell? A page dedicated to Dell? I am sure the relationship is completely platonic…
[tags]Watanabe, Inquisitor, TUAW[/tags]