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You’ve passed your apprenticeship, you can code confidently and at the very least competently and now you’re striking out on your own because you have that creative spur to *do something*.
So why on Earth, or Mars or Venus would you rip the code from a component vendor’s demo, make a few cosmetic changes and expect to sell it?
Yet that’s exactly what I saw suggested today on the BOS forum. It’s the kind of disinformation newcomers do not need. I blogged here recently about “If You Don’t Love It Don’t Release It”. How the heck can you love something you have zero creative investment in and zero intellectual investment in? You can’t. You’re literally embracing Amateur-Ville. The realm of the clueless and bereft of talent. There are so many things that need writing/designing and being made available to so many markets.
How did Andy Bryce come up with Perfect Table Plan? Was it because a component vendor made something similar available as a demo? Nope. He identified a market that he could bring his talents to and developed something people wanted. He sells software he clearly loves and from what I can see his customers love it too.
Andy is not the only one. There are so many great applications and some of them don’t take a lot of brain and teeth gnashing to come up with. Patrick McKenzie and his Bingo Card Creator. Hardly a new idea, yet Patrick’s approach is very fresh, compared to his competition, especially his marketing and after sales. His customers seem to love it and it sells. What more could one ask?
A very good friend of mine writes beautiful components for Delphi. Some years back I wrote some of the demos for his ESBPCS VCL library. They are designed purely to demonstrate using the components with, in the case of the demos I did for him, a database via the VCL. They are rudimentary - but they belong to the developer who created them - or the developer they were assigned to (I assigned the code to ESB). I, nor I doubt ESB, would bother chasing a looser trying to sell the simplistic demo as a product, but honestly, how could one feel anything but utter contempt for such a lame brain?
If you have to rip a demo program, mod the interface a tad and release it as a “ISV” product then I’d suggest you do not love your product (how could you with zero intellectual or creative effort invested?) or your ISV company and have complete contempt for your customers, current or potential.
As I’ve said here before, an unloved product ultimately expires via a death of asphyxiation caused by lack of interest and lack of sales. It even harms the efforts of other ISV’s by jading consumer’s perceptions of small software companies.
This is not to say a product must be complex or even totally original or unique. In fact simplicity can have elegance and simple, competent and elegant sells – ask any Mac user. But ripping a demo, modding a few UI elements and expecting to earn a dollar is in my mind immoral at worst and clueless and lame at best.
Over the years as a moderator of software forums I’ve seen a lot of lame stuff submitted for announcement. Over and over again I’ve seen the example program from a certain Delphi how-to book consisting of a rudimentary calculator being sold for $29.95 down to $9.95. They were kidding right? They didn’t even have divide by zero protection coded in, had no keyboard support, just mouse, and looked like crap. At least one of these “developers” went on to moan publicly that nobody was buying his software and he assumed piracy must be the reason. Windows comes with a calculator 10,000 times more powerful than these ones and they reckon it was pirated? Abject losers!
Please. If you think you can do something worthwhile by making interface changes to a demo program offered by a component vendor – do the world a favor and get a job more suited to your talents. Like becoming a dole bludging surfie.*
(*Dole bludging Surfie – Australian slang for an unemployed, lazy beach bum).
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