Open Letter to Warez Jerks

The president of WebIS, makers of great software like Pocket Informant and FlexMail, has posted an open letter to software pirate sites. I'm linking it for a few reasons:

• It's very well-written
• It's right
• It brings up a very good point:

If you actually use our software please pay for it. [...] WebIS has always been extremely liberal in our licensing as well. We don't use activation (we've thought about it), we don't lock our license to your username, we don't do anything to make licensing hard. We let you run our software on as many devices that you personally use and we use the honor system. Heck, we even make 2-3 versions of our software in most cases and let you pay for one and get them all.

Indeed, I've trialed many of WebIS' products, probably all of them. A lot of them don't fit with my habits of using a smartphone, but many do. I wanted to point out that 95% of WM developers get it when it comes to shareware for smartphones. It's simple: charge reasonable prices and avoid don't have annoying methods for registration. That's a big deal - in the fight against software piracy it's easy to lose your way and get too restrictive with activations. Activation in itself is highly annoying to me personally as I find myself switching phones basically on a weekly basis for my job here.

Anyhow, the point is that having 3rd party apps for your platform is a good thing, and paying for those apps is the only real way to keep them coming. I tend to think of shareware prices not in dollars but in "Lattes" or even "Value Meals." When you look at a piece of software you will likely use every day as a handful of premium coffees or a couple trips to a fast food joint, then paying for it becomes a no brainer.

Read: Open Letter To Warez Sites - WebIS, Inc. Forums via PocketPC Thoughts