Re: Why do you guys pay for Poker Tracker?
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Firstly (the naive argument), if the open-source is good enough, it may hurt the original. Hopefully not enough to shut it down, but possibly enough to slow down its development and support.
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IMHO then I think a free PT clone would do the exact opposite to this. If the PT devs are making a huge amount of cash from their product, then they will likely do anything to keep doing so; even if that means paying for top class developers to work on it so as to out-compete the free clone. I can't think of a single peace of free software that has ever caused the original they have cloned to just "roll over and die" (this is just not the capitalist way...), but I can think of quite a few examples where it has forced the original payware software to be improved significantly.
Another beneficial effect is that the freeware software may find new features that were not conceived by the payware devs (or which were deemed too much effort to be implemented for no extra return) and these new feature may make it into the payware software thus creating a much better product with more features overall.
Juk [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]
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