My usual practice in the past regarding shareware was to find an activation key online, usually at AstalaVista. The reason for this is that I had no job, and had no money beyond my ‘allowance’. I didn’t pay for it simply out of habit, and I regarded shareware as somehow inferior to freeware.

I’m not reversing my position, but the fact that I’ve bought TextMate, Transmit, and NewsFire in the last 30 days tells me I’ve undergone some sort of paradigm shift. I think this came about when I started thinking about my own soon-to-be-looking-for-a-job self. I think it’d be cool to be able to sustain myself on the applications I’ve written as part of a small company. I’ve never really much liked working for others, so the self-employment route looks appealing to me. Sometime over the last few months I’ve realized, though perhaps not fully consciously, that all these apps I’ve been pirating are made by guys (yeah, not many women in this field) who feel the same way, and by not paying for the apps I use, I’m preventing them from achieving that goal. I certainly wouldn’t want this to happen to me, so I’ve begun to acknowledge the right of these people to be paid for their work.

Open Source is another model I find intriguing. It involves a few people to a few thousand people who collaboratively work on the project. The code is out in the open. It’s free, and because of this it lacks the normal pay-to-use mechanism of proprietary software. It requires another motivator. Some people are paid to work on open source projects by the companies they work for (IBM, RedHat). Some open source projects make money through services and support. Many die because they lack a persistent motivator, and this is too bad.

I’ll sidestep the issue of which model is better and claim that they are good for different things. The nature of the project should determine what model is used. An extension to the HTTP protocol to handle flash crowds? Open source. A standards-compliant web browser? Open source. A marketing tool masquerading as a web browser? Proprietary. A specialized text editor for developers. Either way. When something can be built on top of and is meant to be built on top of, open source is probably best. If not, proprietary is fine. As for me, I hope to do some of both in the future.