Nearly-Right wrote:
Which now side-tracks & reminds me . . . . why is Oliver Roberts NOT be the keyfile authoriser/distributor?
If he is magnanimous enough to volunteer to do it, for a small percentage of the keyfile fee, if OK'd by Stefan, to distribute/sell the IB keyfiles, as he is surely up to the task of being able to do this. He supplies his own for his own products, and collects the fee for his own keyfile.
I cannot think of another person who I would put my FULL TRUST in than Oliver Roberts to do this at this moment.
Nice of you to say so, but the conclusion we all came to was that as long as there are reputable distributors out there who want to sell IBrowse for us, we're happy to let them do that. Why? Well, one reason is time - we'd rather spend what time we have developing, and not having to deal with handling sales, sales tax issues, etc, etc. We don't see any problem paying a distributor to handle all this for us, and then we can concentrate on coding. There are of course many other things a distributor can offer, such as support, CD-ROM versions (yes, some users still want this), publicity, etc, etc, and all those aspects need to be considered. If the worst comes to the worst, I'd be happy to handle the purchases myself, but not while there are better offers out there. It's also important to support the remaining Amiga shops out there - there aren't many left.
Regarding the WarpDTs, registrations for those are relatively low volume, and once payment is received I do everything else manually - takes a bit extra time, but automating the whole process would take even longer to setup in the first place.
And going back to my F1GP-Ed days, yes I handled all that myself too, and that was a relatively time consuming task considering everything was done manually back then and involved sending out floppy disks. That was a high volume product compared to the WarpDTs, and I suspect IBrowse is even higher, so I know enough to realize that I'd rather pay somebody else to do that task for me now (I'm a lot older now :-D).
I'm not saying any more on this matter - all I can say is that I have been in discussions with a particular distributor for some time, and I can only apologize if e-mails from other distributors have been ignored (I know some did get caught in spam filters). From memory, I guess we received e-mails from about 5 potential distributors - I think we did reply to all of them and/or forwarded them to Stefan. However, I guess we're trying to keep all options open until a definite deal is done via Stefan, which is why those interested might not have received a simple yes/no answer. I know this matter should have been sorted out a lot sooner, but this is beyond my control.
