Free products - are they good or bad on balance?

Free content = good.
New players become a lot more scepticle about the game if they have to get their credit card out before theyve seen anything impressive.

Well - I dunno.

I can't make head nor tail of what CrystalShard wants to donate to other creators. Its a fine present to the person who just uses it.

But what does it mean when other creators are invited to "modify" it, but forbidden to sell it? Is this meant to spawn a whole chain of further free-give-away products, of steadily increasing sophistication, and incorporating the unrewarded efforts of more and more people ?

Surely if this really is "just for fun" with no other motive, people could be invited to do as they please ? I can see that some unscrupulous person could simply start selling the thing as it is to poor ignorant newbies, but to be honest, I expect some swine will do that anyway, and no-one will be able to stop them, since they can just cut-and-paste the script as their own.

As for "teaching us all what a truly wonderful script looks like", isn't this just a little self-congratulatory ? It is very well written, but there are lots of others just as good open to view in the library and elsewhere.

I think this informal form of license "modify as you wish but never sell" is little more than an invitation for people to misbehave, so that they can then be endlessly castigated from a superior position if found out.

I think generosity in this situation should be indivisible.

You either give without conditions, or you keep the script closed, and just give an un-modifiable object to be used in game.

Otherwise you put other creators in a very ambiguous and ill-defined position. Some of us need to be paid for our scripting hours, as a contribution to our game costs.

Fun? yes! Is it free? No!

What the hell, I'll just rewrite the whole damn thing better without looking. It seems such a waste of time when I could get straight on with the enhancements, just by stealing a few chunks of code out of something that its creator claims to have donated.

If ever I donate a script to other creators (gotta get more established first) it'll be totally without conditions except a gentle request to please not sell it totally unmodified, but realising there's nothing I can do to stop it.

Yep, I know, I know, I'm a miserable ungrateful grumpy grasping swine, aren't I ?

As a newbie scriter, I saw this script & picked up a copy, thinking 'wow, cool!! Something else for me to play/tinker with '
I would suggest any other scripters who do not remember this feeling have Selective or Short term memories



Think of it an educational/example script ^^



Hmmm, did you actually READ what CS wrote i wonder ???



Wow, you are upset... relised you just cant steal it ??

When i first arrived here it was due to free stuff that i learned lots of what can be done in sl and yes Merwan is correct givin' stuff away is a long held sl tradition.

And thank you Crystal and Siggy for your contributions. Let the tradition grow forever.

No, you misunderstand totally, Shadow. I am not upset. I am a person who likes clarity. I am thinking hard about exactly what it means to donate something to the community. About its actual impact, overall, on the wider good.
About exactly what conditions with regard to copying and reuse are rational (ie actually mean something clear and effective) and are fair and constructive.

Its simply that I see no clear dividing lines between "modifying" something, cutting and pasting a few lines of code from it, or just "learning from it" by examining it. I think they blur and merge into each other. Do I really need to bore you with concrete examples ? Can't you see the difficulty ?

This is not just negative, Shadow, I am working towards formulating a suggestion for a way of doing it which will meet the needs of everyone in the best possible way. Learning what everyone else feels via the forums is part of the process.

The only reason CrystalShards fine script has been mentioned here is as a particularly obvious example of the general principles, bringing out a number of the issues rather well.

And please, this is an adult discussion about a serious issue. Your final line doesn't do you justice. Anyone who wants to "steal" an openly published script can just do it, label it as their own, and hide it behind a "no-mod" screen. Didn't you know that ? A thief doesn't analyse the issues in forum. Ugh !

I'm not quite sure what you mean, but if you are asking if someone makes something in SL and then gives it away for free would it affect the economy of SL in a negative or positive way, then I would say it depends on the product. If it was a game changing script that everyone would want to have, or a really nice enhancement, then yeah, by not selling it the economy would remain the same instead of growing, as people will be playing with their new free thing than buying a variety of other things.

So, if I read your question right, a really cool thing should be sold and not given away, for the good of LL and the economy overall.

Oh Daz, I'm sorry - you've arrived a bit late. We've just spent a whole thread discussing that. The conclusion, by a huge majority, is that its always good to give a product away free. Only a few of us are not certain its always best.

I always like to test hypotheses by reducing them to an extreme. Suppose some very rich "benefactor" turned up, employed a full time team of people to reverse engineer every interesting product, and keep on creating great new ones, so that every item for sale had a free version that was just as good or better.

Would that be good for SL ? Wouldn't the flow of creative effort be cut drastically? To maybe a quarter what it is now or less? Wouldn't every scripter get disheartened when everyone went for the free version of their project? Till in the end few people had any skills at all ? Or else just kept everything to themselves or two or three trusted friends?

If its true for that extreme case, it must be just a little bit true for us, surely? In at least some circumstances ?

Still, I guess that case is too extreme. It's all academic anyway, isn't it ? Everyone has the freedom to give things away if they wish. But I do find it interesting to consider.

The other point relates to the question of what is the best way to attach conditions to a script you want to give, open, to the community. Not an easy question itself.

But you shouldn't listen to me. I'm out on a limb in all this, lol.

*smiles*
I may have misread when you wrote:


There seems to be a catch22 here...
How will newbie scripters like myself learn without examples? and at what point do example scripts 'kill' creativity.....

And in the end any 'concensus' reached is a moot point, because nobody is going to tell me what I can & cant do with code that I (eventually) write...

Personally, I think free items are something of a blessing, especially to either those who cannot afford (or do not wish to spend) the money. If a quality free product is availible, then for consumers this is fantastic.

Economically, free items can act as a good catalyst for creation (especially if one can learn from them), but it also raises the bar: If you want to sell something that competes with a freebie, you better make sure it's better than the freebie to justify the cost.

Most free items tend not to be very advanced, and hence this raises the quality of all competing products if they wish to succeed.

By saying 'You cannot sell item y for $x' you are instituting trade barriers which prohibit normal market forces. Freebies dont scare people away from generating content; usually they inspire people to do better. For consumers and creators, this is a win/win situtation.

-Adam

These creators that basically give away free valuable stuff should never be berated or scolded for doing so. They are keeping SL's stores and other creators from gouging the market and keeping it balanced, just look at the prices of the other video Tv's that basically have the same bookmarks for the same type of movies..its outrageous,,,God Bless then for there pure motives of merely contr8ibuting to SL without expecting ant monetary gain,,without them...all of SL would turn into a giant high priced Mall and i think SAL realizes that without them Second life would be a much worse place...I look up to all these creators and ALL the people who post free scripts on these forums!