#NO MORE FISH DISKS ???
16 messages in this thread
I happen to be one of those 41 subscribers to the Fish library direct from
Fred. It is far from cheap! It costs approximately $900 per year to get a
direct subscription from him. My own subscription is not a personal one, but
rather a club subscription. In fact, it is three clubs that pool their
resources in order to get the disks directly from Fred. Not many clubs can
afford approximately $1000 per year for the originals, plus the price of the
number of disks necessary to supply the various copiers, archivers, etc. who
maintain the club libraries, but lots of clubs could band together with other
nearby clubs as my three have done. (At the time of my first order, I wrote to
Fred, explaining what we planned to do and making sure it was satisfactory with
him.)
As a club librarian who has spent many long hours maintaining a club library, I
can tell you that when I had spent about 80 hours downloading, sorting and
selecting, and then preparing six disks for my club each month, if no one
wanted those disks, I had REAL doubts about the worth of my efforts. I think
even some letters letting Fred know we appreciate his work would be helpful at
this time.
We had a meeting at DevCon to discuss this matter, and some people are looking
into it – people from Commodore and others. We have come to depend on Fred to
do this work, and will feel a very serious loss if he decides to stop doing it.
Betty
Betty,
What's Fred's address? Does he have an email account. I completely
agreed with you when you say we've come to depend on him
Matthew from NZ
Matthew,
I am away from home for about ten days and am writing from a motel room. I
don't have Fred's address with me. He can be reached via internet, but I'm not
sure of his internet address, either. I hope someone else can get you the
address sooner than I can. If not, ask me again on April 25 and I'll get it
for you.
Betty,
Shouldn't you save your members money by buying a CD-ROM drive and and
the Fish CD? The CD even comes with a utility to easily copy individual
volumes to floppies. And you could consider them originals.
It's not our fault Fred didn't try some innovation in his distribution.
$900 a year (for bulky floppies, no less) is outrageous– And thanks for
warning me of the cost, I'll stick with Hypermedia Concepts. No wonder his
subscription base withered. Lower rates, some minor advertising, and a
CD-ROM offering would put him back in business. He could even expand with
an up-to-the-minute Fish BBS (which would also help the collection better
represent the freeware that is available). If he ran a pay BBS, it would
help bring his distribution to current methods, and could come to rival
any of the existing pay systems, not to mention make him some money and
save his subscribers money. After all, a subscription with Fred serves the
purpose of original copies on a 'hot off the press' basis… Are floppies
via US Mail the best way to do this? Not when people think nothing of
downloading 880K+ files these days.
-Chris
Someone has to have a lot of love to do a disk collection for free. If Fred
were creative and/or inspired enough to turn the disks into a business, then
they might last longer. He has a real job, and I doubt he'd be foolish enough
to risk a full-time business making and selling public domain disks. People
feel he is obligated to give away these disks for next to nothing… and
that's even tougher when someone else adds value to what you've given away, and
makes a profit again, ala HyperMedia's CDs.
As the one-time manager of the old AMICUS disks, I think I have a special
perspective on this. Amazing Computing was paying me a royalty for a while,
per disk they sold through the magazine, while I worked there. (They stopped
paying after I left, although our handshake agreement said nothing about
that… the scums, they've been making money on those disks for years…) If
it wasn't for the money, it wouldn't have been worth it. And I was pleased that
the disks served a double duty by helping many Amiga user groups get off the
ground. By selling disks, they had a no-brainer fund raiser.
I hope Fred turns over official control to someone like Hypermedia, and that in
the future, the disks are only released on CD-ROM – virus-free, pristine, and
easily distributed and duped to floppies only as needed.
Ah, but notice I didn't say full-time business. If he ran a BBS, he could
do the necessary organization for the disks as part of the BBS
maintainance. It would require some careful planning and some automation
beyond his existing database setups, but it can be done. When new uploads
are approved you can then make sure it has the necessary "contents"
description and allocate space for it on disk #xxx. Most Amiga sysops are
already duplicating Fred's efforts every time we receive a new upload (we
check the description, the file itself, and catalog it into the proper
category); It's true the most sysops don't check for infected programs to
the extent that Fred does, but if its for a pay BBS then it'll be worth
the time.
The value-added issue wouldn't be so tough if he were the one offering
the CDROMs. I hope Fred _doesn't_ turn the collection over to Hypermedia..
They seem rather disorganized; They lost my upgrade order for months
(stupid especially considering it was COD, but they didn't seem to want or
need the money).
-Chris
A well run BBS takes a lot of time to organize and run well. Add on top
of that the time it takes to organize submissions, and you're talking
about quite a bit of time. I think that Fred has been doing a great
service to the community, and that user groups should continue to support
him.
Steve
I can't imagine how many submissions Fred must get. I'm sure it's been a long
time since he's done the work himself. I do remember that he hired people
(teens?) to do the duping and shipping, if not the assembly of the disks.
According to a Usenet message, he hired his son and his brother to do much of
the actual work.
Betty
Well, John,
I assume that you waivered your royalties for AMICUS disk no. 22 ;). It
contains my shareware program with the following clause:
"The PrtDrvGen is released as a shareware program, which
means that
1) the copyright to the program is still owned by the author
2) distribution for profit of the program is illegal
3) the shareware fee should be mailed to the author, if you
use the program. Cash is OK.
"
I think that the shareware authors are treated even worse than you. Not
one of the numerous PD/Shareware collections making profit of my program
by including it, has ever cared to acknowledge their use of it e.g. by
mailing me a letter requesting permission or just the disk containing the
program.
The worst case I have experienced, was a German Amiga magazine spending an
entire page on the program with a colour photo of the main screen. It
called the program Public Domain and did not even bother to mention my
name.
In a capitalist society there is certainly nothing wrong in making a
profit based on the labour of others provided you are in a legal and moral
position to do so. I recognize, that it may be difficult to compute the
actual expenses of distributing PD/shareware disks, but your remarks
indicate, that the expenses were more than covered thereby infringing the
rights of most shareware authors.
Personally it does not bother me very much. I just don't like the
principle of installing a motorized water pump in a well and not even
knock on the well owners door to tell him "Thank You" !
Regards, J0RGEN ….from DENMARK
You've listed a number of the reasons why I always recommend against shareware
distribution. Last I remember, Amazing Computing was charging $4-5 bucks a
disk. I'm sure the extra cash helped pay the overhead. And then there's
places like DevWare who sell PD disks… how they afford all the mailings they
do, there's more cash that the creators never see. When someone charges $5 or
less to dupe a disk, how much must they suffer before they don't make a profit?
🙂
In rough orders of magnitude, how many people have registered your program?
Actually they charged $6 a disk ($7 for non-subscribers), and as I regard
the magazine as one of the better ones, the surcharge is OK with me.
My program was released in 1987 and updated a couple of times, but since
then around 100 people have registered with me, some even now. Most of
these people are from the US (kudos to the American moral !), but
otherwise they are from all over the World. I roughly spent almost all of
my spare time during a 3 months period to make the program and CIS got a
fair share of the shareware contibutions as connect charges, because I
supported the program online. However, the CIS SYSOP (sja) noticed this
and granted me free access to the Amigaforum for a few months. A very
commendable gesture !
As you, I would never recommend the shareware method of distribution if a
person was in any way relying on it as a source of income, but the idea of
trying out a program before paying for it really appeals to me. I do have
a couple of commercial programs, which never lived up to my expectations.
Regards, J0RGEN ….from DENMARK
John,
I think Hypermedia is probably treating Fred more fairly than anyone else who
is making a profit on his disks. They are one of his few subscribers. And they
send him a royalty on every disk they sell. They have also contributed to him
in addition to the royalty. Many people selling the Fish disks for profit have
downloaded the disks from Portal or ftp'd them from a Usenet site, and Fred
never saw a penny from those disks.
Betty
Hypermedia pay Fred a royalty on every CDROM they sell. I don't think others
do. However, the CDROM disks are only updated after 50 disks.
Yes, we could save our members money by just buying the CDROM, and I think most
clubs have done exactly that. I think that is what happened to his subscriber
list – along with a few other things. But the truth is, he deserves
compensation for the work he does. I don't know the equitable way to solve the
problems involved. Hope we can find a fair way to do it.
As a matter of fact, my club gets the CDROM version as well as the
subscription. That is, three clubs (I belong to all three, and coordinate the
effort) have joined to subscribe to the disks, and each club gets the
Hypermedia CDROM disk as well. By splitting the cost among three clubs –
and we did this with Fred's knowledge and permission – we could afford to
support him still. He really deserves the suppport.
Betty
Well, he does have a _tape_ distribution. (DC6150 tape — TAR format).
I think that is Fred creates a "Fish BBS," he should either 1)charge
something like $1/disk for downloading the "assembled" disks or 2) make
the area containing the disks a "subscribers only" section. Either of
these solutions should work fairly well… And allow him to comtinue to
produce the collection.
// Brian — Cruising on AutoPilot…..
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