[838] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Software Sales via e-mail
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Edward Vielmetti)
Sat Jun 15 14:08:18 1991
To: lws@capybara.comm.wang.com (Lyle Seaman)
Cc: com-priv@psi.com, dcm@teal.csn.org, jqj@duff.uoregon.edu
In-Reply-To: Your message of Fri, 14 Jun 91 20:12:57 -0400.
Date: Sat, 15 Jun 91 14:03:38 EDT
From: Edward Vielmetti <emv@ox.com>
> I've been waiting for somebody to actually deliver product that way.
Where have you been? apple has sent out System 7.0 from ftp.apple.com,
you can pick up new Annex load images and cisco images over the net,
telebit releases beta netblazer images for ftp, and i'm sure with
a little more poking you could find more.
Granted these are all products which are useless to you unless you
have purchased some vendor hardware, so they can easily enough be put
out for anonyous ftp without giving away the store. I think that if
you look a little you'll find software that's distributed this way too,
with a public ftp area that has product information etc., and a private
ftp area that once you pay your license fees you get access to.
I have a couple of CD-ROMs in my posession which have "demo-ware" on
them, products which work just enough to demonstrate to you that you
need to have them. Call up the supplier with your credit card number
and they will give you a secret key which unlocks the full commercial
version. There's a lot of resistance from software archivists to
keeping these "crippleware" versions in their archive collections, but
as a means of distributing commercial software on the net there's no
particularly good reason that the distribution medium would need to be
CD-ROM and not direct file transfer over the net, except for perhaps
bandwidth limitations.
So long as people are sensitive to the way the net is organized, there
are tactful and appropriate ways of providing thse services. Having
the support of your regional network is key -- it would appear that
WESTNET is somewhat less than a hospitable environs to try to pursue
any kind of partly or wholly commercial enterprise.
--Ed
