Inquisitor raises some questions

I'm one of those people who doesn't like DW, and no longer support him. I'm going to talk about one of my friends' experiences with DW's support.

He (my friend) got NewsFire from the MacHeist bundle last year. He was known in the MH community, and his email way known. Apparently some people stole his license by entering in his email address. This guy doesn't pirate; he didn't share it himself. He emailed DW because NewsFire rejected his license. DW responded with a list of countries and regions the license was used in. I can understand he doesn't want people to pirate his software, but seriously, an email address is so easy to guess. Any 'big' person in tech, who has ever talked about NewsFire probably has a license, and you could just guess it. If DW is going to be accusing people of sharing their licenses, he should put a better registration system in place.

He'll probably throw out my NewsFire license now that I said this about him and his support. Honestly, I don't care, because I don't want to support him, and if I ever want another NewsFire license (which I don't think I will want another one, ever), I could just stick in someone's email, and boom.

Hilarious!

The guy is an idiot. I for one will not be touching any of his stuff again. Lesson learnt.

Your link to his blog post is a dead end. He apparently doesn't stand behind his words for too long. Here's a copy of what *was* posted.

It’s true, Inquisitor supplements results for certain keywords with product links to Amazon.com and the Apple Store. But the thing is, this isn’t news. It’s been like this ever since Inquisitor 3 was released 16 months ago. This behavior is public knowledge, and after over a year of soak-time in the public with no complaints it should be a non-issue. So, imagine my surprise when I wake up to a mailbox containing words unfit for publication, blogs declaring me as the biggest ******* in the world, and demands that people sabotage and steal my work.

I’ve always been very proud of Inquisitor. It’s small, lightweight, and entirely unique at what it does. Best of all, the revenue model means that Inquisitor 3 is totally free for users. I think it’s quite clever in how it presents ads. Ads are treated like any search result, meaning that if a user clicks on a different choice, the ad will sink below the chosen result. So, if an ad isn’t what you wanted, it will drop in the rankings, ultimately sinking to the bottom. This design is deliberate. It gives the user an element of control, and is a nice compromise between the necessity of ads and the need for users to control their experience. That said, Inquisitor’s ads are hardly pervasive. They appear only for a small handful of keywords, so sparsely chosen that the average user will never see one. Revenue-wise they are marginal, but every little bit helps.

Now, I guess people have forgotten that Inquisitor 2 was a shareware product. The release of Inquisitor 3 as ad-supported freeware was a massive risk. I doubt many shareware authors would take a successful revenue-generating product and make it freeware on a whim. However, at the time I was feeling idealistic. I genuinely felt that Inquisitor was a great experience that everyone ought to be able to enjoy, and that it made the world (a small bit) better. So, with good intentions I made the switch to freeware. The inclusion of very limited advertising was a necessary evil, to dampen the financial disaster of the switch.

Ultimately, designing great software isn’t easy, especially when it’s being done as a hobby. I have few resources and since expectations are unbounded, it’s a certainty that I will always fall short. That’s not evil, malice, or incompetence - it’s just meathook reality. Nonetheless, I grit my teeth and try my best. But increasingly my good intentions and sacrifice are being met with cynicism and deliberate mean-spiritedness. Fundamentally I’m a nice person, quiet spoken and non-confrontational. Sacrificing six years of my life to enhance the lives of people whom I will never meet is not a self-serving action. But when I get threatened with harm and called an ******* by someone I have never met, when my ‘transgression’ was creating something unique and giving it away for free to everyone… well, my idealism about the Mac dies a little. If this is you, then I welcome you to leave. Your burden is not one I wish to bear.

"A bunch of you are overly obsessed with privacy issues, while nobody even cares about it."

Notwithstanding the fact that that sentence doesn't even make sense, it's not about privacy issues, it's about the developer being open about what he's doing. If he feels the need to hide this away - when being open would cost him nothing, what else is he hiding?