Stan is going about this all the wrong way, he should keep the current version free as it always was but he should work on creating two cash cow versions, one dedicated to vp9 encoding and one dedicated to hevc encoding, he could charge a nominal licensing fee of say $20 per license with online authentication in order to prevent piracy and i think he could make himself a few bucks with that.īut the real monetization opportunity with media coder is as a sample of his work to a prospective employer that has the money generation infrastructure already in place and can pay him a good salary to keep doing what he's doing or alternatively teaching in a university in china, with his background and fame i'm sure they would hire him to teach some comp sci classes.Ĭode: #cs.
now all of a sudden he started trying to monetize his software and started offering commercial licenses that from what i remember are quite expensive and i remember thinking to myself at the time "who the hell would spend this much on a commercial media coder license. things changed a couple of years ago when he graduated college and announced he was now a married man with a kid on the way (i think he said he has a daughter). based on what Stanley has said over the years i always assumed that he coded media coder a) because he wanted a sort of "fame" within the community as the author of a popular piece of software and b) as a sort of functional resume he could show prospective employers. Here's my take on this: i can understand wanting to be paid for your work but here's the reality:ġ) once you get people used to "free" it's very difficult to move them to "paid", people see it as either a "bait and switch", a scam or they think it's a dick move.Ģ) if you wanted to be paid for your work then you should have decided that at the outset.
Unethical would be to send you a message that you had 5 minutes to make a donation and enter a code and if you didn't, it was going to start deleting random files on the hard drive in a way that bypasses the Recycle Bin (it is possible to do that). That fact that you don't like it and it's a bit of a jerk move doesn't in and of itself make it unethical.
It's not unethical to switch mediacoder to a pay version or to hold it hostage like this, zoobie. See VCDEasy for an example of this very scenario. The program that people donated for will continue to work as it is but it may not work any more in future versions of Windows. He might abandon the program permanently in anger over this. Some people do respond to this sort of thing by paying, so he will get some more donations, but it will also piss off as many or more people than it gets money from, so his expectations won't be met in terms of number of donations and amount. One of the problems of this is that it starts a vicious circle where the author is now in pissed off mode all the time because "nobody is donating". We've also seen the first disturbing signs that ImgBurn is moving in this direction, although it hasn't gone this far - yet. Probably almost nobody donates anything and the author is unwilling to continue his work for free.