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You Get What You Pay For- by Pete Grubbs
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I've had my share of jobs in the relatively few years that I've lived. For quite a number of years I worked with my parents on their dairy here in Western Pennsylvania. I'm currently employed by the Pennsylvania State University as a teacher of composition. During my undergraduate career, I spent a lot of time in the Clarion University of Pennsylvania's Theater Department studying set and lighting design. I executed a few designs for University productions and eventually attracted the attention of a member of the local chamber of commerce who wanted to engage my services as a lighting designer for a local beauty pageant which was to be held in the University's 800 seat auditorium -- a venue I was more familiar with than my own bedroom. We discussed the particulars of a contract, it was drawn up, I signed my name and went to work.

To call the job a nightmare is to understate its horrific impact by half.

The producers of the show didn't seem to realize the importance of being consistent with the positions their contestants took on the stage. I guess they figured I could swing out over the battens my ninety-odd instruments were suspended from, and adjust them in the middle of the show so that the girls would be standing in light and not shadow. I guess they also figured that it would do my cardiovascular system good to hang, focus and gel (the act of putting framed colored pieces of gel in front of the lighting instruments lamp to change the color of the light on stage) those same ninety-odd instruments by myself since they did not provide a crew for me to work with. In the space of thirty-six hours uninterrupted by anything resembling sleep or a decent meal, I worked feverishly to beat that opening curtain. The result wasn't anything I expected to receive a Tony award for, but I did feel that I'd done at least enough to earn the $150 stipulated in my contract.

I was the only one who felt that way.

The outcome of this particular story isn't really all that important to the rest of this editorial. For the curious, let me just say that, my reply to the chamber of commerce was as brief as it was vigorous and while my suggestion as to what they could do with their money might have been impractical, not to mention uncomfortable, it would have created quite an aesthetically pleasing image. Pleasing to me, at any rate.

What I really want to focus on here is the unfairness of the entire situation. Wouldn't you be mad as hell if your hard work were so completely undervalued that someone not only had the gall to insult it, but profited by it while offering you far less than its honest value? And what can we say of those who would take advantage of another's hard, honest work? Since OS/2 e-Zine! is family-oriented entertainment, perhaps we cannot adequately express such an opinion, but surely we have little respect for such people and hope fervently that they never receive a gift they honestly enjoy.

Consider, then, the plight of the small software vendor. These folks devote many frustrating hours of work to provide a host of valuable applications for end-users like you and me. They post fully-functioning versions of these applications on web and FTP sites and allow us to try them risk-free for significant periods of time so that we know exactly what were buying and how it's going to work for us. This isn't all that different from a restaurant only charging its patrons if they really loved their meal or a car dealer who allows his customers to take home any car on the lot and drive it around for a month or two without asking for a deposit, down-payment, telephone number or home address. In return, they ask that we send them their license fee or remove their software from our systems at the end of the trial period. They assume all of the risk and we are, by and large, the clear beneficiaries of their trust.

Can you blame them when they get discouraged or disgusted with those of us who not only continue to use their software past the trial period without paying for it, but even profit from its use?

Of course, this kind of piracy is common throughout the PC community and there are probably untold millions of copies of Windows shareware and shrink-wrapped apps which have never brought their authors a dime, but we need to look at this in the circumstances which are unique to the OS/2 community. Because of our comparatively small population, our software authors, shareware and shrink-wrap, can't absorb the kind of losses their Windows counterparts can. If we don't pay for the software that we run, there aren't going to be 10, or 100, or 1,000 other honest, responsible customers to take our place. There's no way for those loyal OS/2 ISVs to recoup their losses. They're just out of luck.

And so are we. If we allow these folks to twist in the wind while we blithely ignore their economic plight, they will eventually be forced to move into markets which have a high enough percentage of paying customers to make their efforts worth their while. We will then be left with an operating system without support for its existing applications and no one willing to develop new ones.

As the months and years stretch out ahead of us, our choices will continue to dwindle until we either accept our fate and reconcile ourselves to diminishing efficiency on our machines and in our homes and workplaces or move to another, better supported, more profitable (notice I didn't say more efficient, more intuitive, more stable or more robust) platform. I don't know about you, but the very thought of this makes me break out in a cold sweat. And unlike those who are already using that other system, we are in the unique position of being able to determine our fate.

If we demonstrate the kind of loyalty to the software authors of such applications as Object Desktop or Emil Fickel's Commander, and, most importantly, put our money where our loyalty is, we will continue to enjoy the kind of relationship with them that not only provides solid, reliable, useful applications but gives us some input into subsequent versions of those apps. This is an advantage that those who use a more popular operating system can never hope to achieve unless they're buying a thousand licenses at a time, not just one.

On the other hand, if we are willing to serve only our own selfish ends and say, "the hell with tomorrow, I'm worried about this afternoon," we will doom ourselves and our operating system and will have no one but ourselves to blame, as we stare helplessly into the face of yet another inopportune GPF.

* * *

Pete Grubbs is a self-described OS/2 wonk, a doctoral candidate in English literature at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, a part-time faculty member at Penn State and is currently developing a copy editing/creation service, The Document Doctor, which tailors documents for small businesses.


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