[Grunch]

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I'm a student,

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This explains everything. Once you get some experience with real life software development, you'll see why people are willing to pay for software rather than writing it themselves.

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It seems you don't know enough about 'real life' software development, because if your views made any sense you would be able to back them up by the failure of the open source movement which is, to say the least... simply not failing.

Maybe I should write it just for myself and any collaborators since it seems to be in the spirit of poker that everyone should have to pay, forget the generosity and positives of open sourcing the code. Actually, I could do that, and I would be limited to what I could personally implement. Poker tracker is limited by a team of developers, that also will undoubtedly not be around forever to support paying customers and changes. If this type of thing was open and learned by even a few people, the software would be able to continue to thrive. I am done trying to explain this to you guys, maybe one of the supporters could point me in the direction of a software forum that has a poker discussion where people will just mind their own business if they find a project a waste of time? I'm pretty sure I could find a thousand projects online that I would consider less than worthwhile, should I have a problem with them being developed? Should I be writing in to the authors critically second guessing their desire to learn through coding? You must be real involved with software development, sounds like a very 'Microsoft' way of thinking, what do you have against open source? Many of the things you take for granted on today's internet would not be possible if not for the work of volunteer programmers.

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Most programmers working in open source work for a salary. They are not volunteers.

You seem to be holding the open source banner high. You, of all people, should know that "free" refers not to money but restrictions on use and modification.

There is much more to writing a full-fledged software package which is ready for public disctribution that you seem to think. You seem to be saying that it would be a simple matter to write a parser, and a simple matter to write code that inserts records in to a database. True enough, these are fairly simple things. But you also seem to be making the connection that because these two things are simple to do, writing a PT equivelant must also be simple. This is about as far removed from reality as is possible, and frankly I'm suprised that you, supposedly being a programmer, would think otherwise.

I'm not suggesting that you should abandon your plan to write an open-source alternative to PT. In fact, I encourage you to do it. If you actually succeed, it will look good on your resume, at least.

Your original question was,

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Why do you guys pay for Poker Tracker?

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My answer is because it works, and because it's cheap. And because when it breaks (don't be so foolish as to think you'll write bug-free code) I know that I don't have to fix it myself.

My question for you is why are you opposed to paying for PokerTracker? What is wrong with doing things "the MicroSoft way?" (Which by the way is the way software has been produced since before MS existed)