Indie Software Dev

[Martin Owens]

Hello Jon,

All the game makers that make FDO versions (aka Linux versions) of their
games say they make good money from them. The ones that fail are usually
the ones that disrespect the market by not making the FDO version
available for general consumption in a nice easy way. They make it so
hard to install that players can hardly say they have support at all.

My advice, make it easy to consume, make it easy to pay for and people
will.

There was an interesting experiment done by the people at World of Goo
when they produced their FDO version. They have a unique code in each
game which identifies it. they wanted to see the numbers of copies that
were pirated, vs bought. Since they didn't restrict the copying of it
with DRM.

What they found was that people using Free Software systems tended to be
much more respectful of copyright and bought the game, rather than
copying it. The most copying was done on Windows.

I think people in the community are ready to buy software. Of course I
would prefer if the software were FOSS and that you were being paid a
good amount from software development from your users, rather than
licenses. But I suppose the close it down and hire big door men approach
is so well entrenched that investment model can't even win friends in
Canonical or Red Hat.

Martin,

On Fri, 2010-03-05 at 15:43 -0600, Jon Buys wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I posted this on the Ubuntu Forums, and didn't get a whole lot of feedback, so I thought I'd try this mailing list.  
> 
> I'm launching a commercial software business. I'm targeting the Mac right now, but I am curious to find out how this would be received by the Linux community. I have an ongoing conversation with a friend of mine about this, and I think that the free and open culture surrounding Linux would mean that there is no market for an indie dev to go after. He thinks that the market is here, am I wrong?
> 
> Would anyone buy a $20 app on Linux?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Jon
> 
>