yes. some type of unified licensing is on the list for Stacks v4.5. currently maintaining secret downloads is very onerous for developers. but doing serial numbers for hundreds of stacks is untenable. so… we need something in between. a way to make it easy to purchase/sell stacks that still gives complete freedom to developers and doesn’t require anything difficult from the user. i honestly don’t know what the answer is here. we might try a few things and see what sticks.
my views of piracy are less rigid than most – but some piracy became rampant a couple years ago. the encryption/signing features are all to slow/prevent pirating through the automatic update system.
Well, there is the currently the RW community – and it does glean quite a bit of revenue from the stream through advertising. But nothing built in to the app. I’m not sure that will ever happen, but it could, I suppose.
this is currently a debate the wider industry is having. the steady stream has not yet proven itself to be good at delivering value to users – however it has proven that it can generate a lot of revenue – at least from larger corporations like Adobe.
for myself, i’m happy doing the one-time purchase with irregular updates. it encourages me to keep developing and users can decide at each upgrade point whether they want to keep investing.
however, i do need to find a way to upgrade more frequently and at lower cost. i’m currently averaging about 1 upgrade every 3 years. that makes budgeting difficult.
a bit of sharing-to-much-honesty: when it gets down near the upgrade end i’m pretty close to broke. and on the other end i feel like i’m a crazy rich person. it’s a very bi-polar way to live. it would be much nicer if i could find a way to spread it out a little bit.