I would like to buy a Hailo
Myself and the other author of Hailo just got what looks to be very odd spam asking us whether someone could buy a copy of Hailo.
Here's an E-Mail that was sent to Hinrik:
I want to buy a Marklov pluggable engine, Where can i buy one, i am coming to
Iceland for a visit, can i come to your shop?
And, in another E-Mail sent to me:
Hi,
I would like to buy a Hailo. Where can i get one and how much do they cost?
Thanks Julie
Clearly I should quit my dayjob and start selling copies of Hailo on CD in a dedicated store just for this purpose.
More seriously though, is anyone else getting similar spam these days about their CPAN distros? It seems odd to get a couple of these E-Mails within a few days.
We did have someone contact us a couple of years ago legitimately wanting to buy a license for of Hailo. It took quite a long E-Mail exchange to convince that person that yes, we were in fact giving it away for free.
Blogging about anything Perl-related I get up to.
Hi
No, I have never had that happen.
Did you try asking for the money in advance :-))?
Cheers Ron
I've had clients who've told me it's easier for them to buy a license than use open source software for free. Mostly, it's getting over a liability hump so they have someone to sue when things go wrong. I've even been advised to set up a separate company just to sell the licenses, put no assets in the company, and just close it down if there was a problem. I didn't do that.
What brian is telling is strange. As far as I know, proprietary software companies such as Microsoft, sell their software with a big “no warranty” disclaimer in all-capital letters in their licences, which prevents you from effectively suing them, and I have yet to hear of anyone suing Microsoft for bugs in their software, which ended up costing people a lot of time (and money) in lost work or in the need for handling malware. (Similar disclaimers also appears in most open source licences, but I'm just saying that non-FOSS software is not better in this respect).
Do you mean that some software vendors actually sell software programs without a disclaimer that will allow their customers to sue them for damages? Or were your clients somewhat deluded? I do know that a qualified engineer can sign (for example) the mission-critical software behind a missile as "defect free", where they will be held liable for any bugs that crop up (and get paid accordingly) but it's not done for all programs out there, and the software development processes involved are more rigorous longer and costlier than that of most open source software.