If you used Mac OS 9 for anything approaching serious web work, you've bumped into Graphic Converter. It really does everything non-graphic design professionals need from their image manipulation program. You also probably didn't pay for it. Though it's mean enough to lock up your entire box for 30 seconds after you've used it a while, the picture here from Graphic Converter's site shows that you've got quite some time before Mr. Lemke is going to be mad at you for doing it.

That's awfully nice, and I suppose is part of the community-buliding motivation that used to go with shareware. As i've posted before, this study/experiment, "Why Do People Register, Does Crippling Work, Does Anybody Really Know?", assuming it's legit, seems to make it pretty clear that such altruism doesn't pay. Though such openness might make you the proverbial industry leader, like it has for GraphicConverter and WinZip, I'm not sure it doesn't lose one money. For GC and WZ, I'm tempted to say the openness worked, but it's a very different model that seems less likely to pay off, short to medium term, and even long term for most developers who don't "share" their way to become an industry standard.

Hrm, this is starting to sound a little like my reasoning behind the GNG Manifesto.

Labels: , , ,