Re: Can I make money by writing IF?
Sat, 9 Dec 1995 15:35:21 -0500
goetz@cs.buffalo.edu (Phil Goetz) writes:
> No need to be private. I like to air my grudges publicly. :)
>
> In 1990 I wrote a shareware X-windows game, Xasteroids, which has been very
> successful. I've received hundreds of email letters thanking me or requesting
> help compiling it. I've had it republished on 2 CD-ROMs, with the shareware
> notice. One of these, in Japan, was a run of around 80,000 copies.
> A descendant of my game (reworked by someone else) is in the Slackware Linux
> release, and my version is (I'm told) in the Debian Linux release. It was goi\
> ng
> to be in the Sun Book of Games on CD-ROM, but was dropped for legal reasons.
> (Imagine that. :) *
>
> I asked $5 for the game. I've had 2 or 3 people pay the $5, plus one guy
> who gave me around $40 to put it on a CD. Prentice-Hall was going to pay
> $100 to reprint it before they dropped it.
Keep in mind that in the world of X software, just about everything is
free. (Unix tools, X Windows itself, and Unix is either free or came
bundled with the computer.) All the games I've seen for X (including
the several I've written) were free. Besides, software is usually
distributed in the form of source code, so crippling shareware isn't
possible.
This is different from the Mac/PC world, where there is a strong
shareware tradition.
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."