From: "daffyddsant" <usenet@davidillig.com>

Date: September 18, 2012 8:09:08 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: No Golden Key, No Future?

Milton Aupperle:

Lastly, I do not understand what you people expect me to do. I have  

given you 13 MAJOR Updates over 4 years including a complete re-write  

from PowerPC to x86 FOR FREE. Over the past 8 years I have invested  

$250,00 in development time and at least $20,000 in hardware for  

testing. I have ALWAYS been around for support - either on this list  

or direct e-mail - days, night or weekends and when I'm on vacation  

too. I have tapped into my RRSP retirement savings TWICE over this  

past year to keep Astro IIDC going - basically putting my retirement  

in jeopardy.  I have cut my expenses to the bare bones and I'm lucky  

if I spend $10 a week on "entertainment" and shop at the cheapest  

grocery places I can to keep things afloat. But I apparently it  

doesn't matter what I do it will never be enough for some of you.

There is one thing you could do, and it has many precedents among people who have stopped development of applications--even a few big-time software companies. On the day when you stop selling Astro IIDC and it is no longer possible to download it from your web site, publish a universal license on your web site and make the final version usable on any Mac with any and all cameras currently supported for as long as the Mac OS is capable of running the software. Some may give away copies and the universal license, but you won't lose anything, because you're not selling anything. Ask people to send you $10 on the honor system when they move the software to a new Mac and a certain percentage, including me, would do so. You have nothing to lose by doing this. That would be enough to placate those of us who have supported you over the years--people like me who have bought your software repeatedly (I have four version 4 licenses, if I'm not mistaken) and who are not among the 2/3 of people whom you say pirate software.

Frankly, given that you have nothing to gain or lose either way, I can think of no reason you would cut off paid, registered users when they upgrade their Macs, except out of spite; a way of punishing a certain subset of Mac users for the hatred of Apple, Inc. that your customers have been hearing about for years.

David Illig

P.S. I'm no Alan Friedman, never will be. But I have been promoting Astro IIDC at <http://www.primordial-light.com/macastronomer.html> for some years with a link to outcastsoft.com and also a link to Alan's Averted Imagination site so that people can see what your software can enable a skilled person to achieve.