I just saw the following at MSJ and the reaction there is simply childish, to not digress much about it. The author of Remote Buddy leaves the post below, asking for them to stop distributing cracks on his software. As a response, tons of links with the crack are published and they start complaining about the price. I really hope that these guys one day get what they deserve, their works pirated or them exploited by their bosses and underpaid. Everyone wants to have tons of shit, for free if possible, but then they forget that money drives the economy. I’m not saying that the price is right or wrong, that’s a market/customer decision. What really pisses me off is the lack of effort for all those idiots downloading the cracks and bashing the developer. At least make an equivalent effort and learn how to do it and take on a “fair fight”.
Disclaimer: I cracked Remote Buddy in the past and published some information regarding it. The author asked for removal and I kindly refused because, at that moment, I believed that the published information wasn’t valuable enough.
Update:
Just to put some things in perspective, let me show a simple math example:
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Months | 12 |
| Monthly Salary | $2,500 |
| Annual | $30,000 |
| App Price | $20 |
| Total Sales | 1504 |
| Monthly Sales | 125 |
If selling this program is the only source of income to this developer and we project a $30k annual salary (low salary by US standards for developers), this will require 125 copies sold each month. Let me remind this values are not net, so there are still other costs and tax burden on the developer (you can add Apple’s 30% as a good estimative).
Now, you could say that 125 monthly or 1500 annual copies is a piece of cake to sell… Have a read at this article, and observe the low numbers of books sold for each book that author wrote. They are pretty shocking and a good example about how hard is to sell (start a company and try it yourself). Not every app is Angry Birds!
Hello,
I’m the author of Remote Buddy and am kindly asking you to stop what you’re doing here.
You may not be aware of it, but the development of Remote Buddy has cost and continues to cost _a lot_ of money and I can only keep working on this and other related projects, if Remote Buddy sales stay above a certain level that allows me to pay all bills for the company, for product development and – most importantly – for my family.
I know many of you believe that piracy doesn’t do any harm or even helps sales, but I sure know that the bare numbers – at least for Remote Buddy – speak a very different language.
Whenever there has been a crack or serial number floating around in the past, sales dropped significantly. It was only when pirated serials had been blocked and cracks went offline that the revenue stream slowly (but luckily!) recovered to a level where Remote Buddy could have a future again.
I’ve always been very generous with my work.
Users can fully try out Remote Buddy for a full 30 days, they can purchase a license for as little as 19.99 Euro and for the last 4 (four!!) years there’s been nothing but free updates (many of them major redesigns you’ll usually have to pay an upgrade fee for at other software companies, plus free updates to support three major OS X releases as they appeared).
When Snow Leopard appeared, I helped out the Plex and many other open source and commercial projects with a free, instant fix for their Apple Remote issues that SL brought along: Candelair. It certainly helped out many of you and some software like Hulu Desktop can’t use an Apple Remote under SL without it to date.
I also spent a lot of time developing and documenting the HIDRemote class (which I have no use for personally) and made it available for free to vastly improve the state of Apple Remote support in OS X applications. I continue to work with open source and commercial developers (even competitors!) to help them with providing better Apple Remote integration in their applications.
You all benefit of this work whenever you use an Apple Remote – regardless of whether you use it with Remote Buddy or not.
I’ve worked very hard to make all of this happen – and I happily did so, because I believe in community and fairness.
But if instead of at least a minimum of respect, all I get in return from the community is that they try to find a way to exploit the generous, feature-unlimited demo time, or that they crack my software and are seemingly happy uploading it to a dozen filehosters, which – in end result – directly cuts into the personal income of my family, I really have to wonder why I’m doing all this – and what for.
Some of you may not have realized that – as a matter of fact – what you are doing directly affects and hurts real people that live off of this project – and – that what you’re doing is part of the biggest threat for the future of this product that you all obviously seem to like.
I’m appealing to nothing else but your sense of honor, community and fairness when I ask you to stop cracking Remote Buddy, to stop spreading copies of cracked versions or instructions on demo timeout circumvention – and to remove any copies from where you’ve already uploaded them to.
If you ignore this and just continue, be aware that you are taking away from the table of my family and that you are working on killing an important, unique product for all Mac users that there’ll be no replacement for.
I’m hoping for your sense of honor, community and fairness – and that my open words are really all that’s necessary.
Thanks.
– Felix Schwarz