!@#% eBay or Why Piracy Makes Sense

[davideo]

Trev wrote:
@davideo

SAS/C is fairly easy to find "in the wild," but I don't recall SAS ever authorizing redistribution....

To be honest - I don't know.

All I can say is that the moderators on that particular board are quite keen on stopping piracy and remove anything that is not legal  :rtfm:

Which is how it should be  :-)

Dave G  8-)

[motorollin]

Trev wrote:
I bid on an Amiga software tool on eBay, a tool I would have liked to use to do legitimate (perhaps professional) software development. I was outbid by a collector who will no doubt put the box on a shelf and forget about it. That's one less new project from me in the future.

How do you know the person who won the auction isn't planning to use it?

--
moto

[Rabbi]

Trev wrote:
I bid on an Amiga software tool on eBay, a tool I would have liked to use to do legitimate (perhaps professional) software development.

Can you tell us what the s/w tool is that you're looking to legally purchase & what s/w you're planning to develop.  If you told us, some of us might be interested in your project & even help you out.   :-)

Inquiring minds want to know!  :lol:

[Trev]

@motorollin

Deduced from their buying history. (Hey, that's another good reason for doing away with buyer feedback. Do buyers really want anyone and everyone to know what they spend their money on? Probably not.)

Re: your sig, has Apple released the iPhone/Touch SDK yet? Haven't seent it, but I haven't been looking.

@Rabbi

It's network related but separate from the uIP and lwIP projects I have going.

[Trev]

The person that finally won the auction (not the same person that outbid me) also recently purchased a pair of costume bunny ears and a copy of the Xanadu soundtrack on vinyl. That's almost too delicious not to comment, but I happen to like Xanadu, so I'll keep my mouth shut.

[TheMagicM]

why would anyone want to buy Lattice just to "collect" it? lol.  I have Lattice and Manx C yet prefer Storm C.

[SACC-guy]

@trev
Piracy NEVER makes sense!!!

I just recently could not afford a new AmigaOne. (sigh)

So, let other folks know it was available.
No complaints.

YOU don't really know what the winners will do with their winnings.

So, if you can't or won't (real reason?) afford to bid...
Please don't gripe or complain. Collectors are legit!!!

I've been an amiga person since 1986. I bought most on my stuff new. Sometimes I passed things up I thought were too expensive. Little did I KNOW that stuff would go for even more cash as used items years later.

I remember you said once, You got started late in the amiga world. If you find good stuff, at your price, great.
Best enjoy your amigas!

Michael(proud collector of amiga)

(edit) if you really need sas-c 6.5...You can have one of my    collected copies (free)

[Trev]

@TheMagicM

I have StormC 3 and have been considering buying 4. I'm really doing most of my development with vbcc, but I want to compare output and verify source compatibility with multiple compilers.

@SACC-guy

The piracy comment was a joke, to be sure. Collectors just make it difficult to do legitimate work on an aging plaform, and apart from the profit associated with sales of said collectables, the collectors underscore the fact that the consumer market for new Amiga-based goods is almost dead. I'm not complaining about that, though, since I really don't plan on profiting by anything I do, even if it were a possibility.

It's true I don't know what people do with their loot, but it's much more fun to make light of it than it is to truly get upset over it. ;-)

I didn't start late (around 1988--I was 13 and upgraded to an A500 from a C64), but I did take a long break from around the time I discovered the opposite sex until the time I had enough disposable income to buy expensive toys.

Your offer of a free copy of SAS/C is awesome; however, I already agreed to buy a copy, and I think I should honor that.

Edit: One could make an argument for copyright infringement as a form of civil disobedience, particularly by individual artists under the yoke of an oppressive publisher, but that sort of discourse is discouraged on this forum, unfortunately.

[morcar]

The amiga is now a retro machine and nothing else. Yes i know people dont like the newer OS's and i think about 80% of people are in the same boat, but you just got to put up with it i guess and make the most out of what you got.

The Amiga was a very good thing when it was out with all the software being made for it and it paved the way for other systems, but developing for it now is a lost cause.

You might as well learn something on the PC and develop for that or if your really going to make anything on the Amiga go for it but dont expect it to rise the Amiga from the dead.

Only this week i was thinking about learning all over again to make games on the ZX Spectrum 128 and the C64 as i used too, but i know even if i do write games for it they wont be main stream.

Oh and by the way as i was a big amiga fan i bought a 600 and a 1200 with cards for extra memory,FPU and so on just to play games which i have to say is far better than running WinUAE.

[Trev]

Working with an Amiga is a much better exercise in programming for a constrained system. I do quite a bit of Windows programming at work (mostly administrative tools), and it's really not as rewarding.

[swift240]

@Trev

Hang on a sec. how do you know he will just stick it on a shelf and forget about it?

Maybe the winner will use it.

Do I detect a sour loser here?

or do we all assume that just because we lose a win on eBay that the other side will just stick it on a shelf and forget about it.

I think its called you win some, you lose some.
For all you know the winner could be a person who will make good use of what he/she has won and put something into the Amiga community.

Such negativity when some one loses.

Mike.

[LoadWB]

It seems to me that learning games and graphics on an old-hand set like C64/128 or Amiga (or anything else with limited hardware compared to today's big boxes) would be good practice and exercise for programming tomorrow's hand-helds.

Granted, within the next several years we'll see hand-helds with much greater power than today.  We already have 400MHz and greater mobile processors like X-Scale and ARM, but many of these machines, while strong in the CPU area, lack large amounts of RAM and GPU capabilities.

Expand upon  that.  Making good icons for the Amiga could mean good money licensing those icons to Symbian, Palm, et al.

Make a good MOD and SID player which will run on a hand-held (J2ME, please, somebody?!) and you have a place for all these obsolete tracker skills.

Really, nothing's new in this world.  We just have different ways of doing the same things.

Okay, that doesn't address the collector/buyer/loser issue.    So I will say that collectors in ALL markets drive up the prices of remaining items.  It's simple supply and demand, unfortunately.  Cars, Happy Meals, Amiga, trading cards, comics, etc.  We all know this, and even if we don't say so, somewhere deep inside we hates it, My Precious.

[Einstein]

SACC-guy wrote:
@trev
Piracy NEVER makes sense!!!

Bandage never makes sense either..  ;-)

[amigakid]

You know as a collector of Amiga I can't really see where your coming from.  I have outbid and been outbid before on Amiga items, it just depends on how bad you want it.  As far as collectors just putting the items pn display, well... some do and some use the stuff.  As a collector I love new things, but I always use what I bid on.  Most amiga collectors are people who have a long history of Amiga use and not only have always wanted certain things but are always wanting more to to find and use.  To say $&%^ Ebay is fine, but dont get upset for being outbid on someything that maybe someone else wanted more and might also use.  I prefer selling/trading from amiga user to amiga user but Ebay does open the door to a whole new world of finding rare Amiga stuff.  Hopefully you wont resort to pirating and just keep your eyes open for the product or maybe see if someone here on A.org might be willing to sell the same item to you.

Cheers!!!

[gdanko]

Contrary to popular belief, eBay is not *the* place to find Amiga gear. I have acquired over 30 Amigas in two years. Not ONE has come from eBay. If you are resourceful enough, you will find Amigas and related hardware and pay 1/5 of what you would pay at an auction.

[JKD]

Dude, it's fine with me...it's only $10 after all..I thought there was some value in getting the manuals and disks together is all..if Mike can get you it for free, more power to him and you

Personally, I don't condone piracy hence my huge CD, DVD and software collection. I have been given copied games i the past but found I didn't value them *at all*...there's no enjoyment in stealing something for me...

I am still a hypocrite though...I do have a few 'stolen' Blu-Ray DVDs...but now the format war is over I'll be fixing that by buying a player and the disks