One of the recurring themes in the shareware industry is how to best protect our work from people that don’t want to pay. I know I’ve written on this topic before, but the recent release of Leopard has brought this back to the forefront of my mind. Another blogger wrote about how many people had pre-ordered the Leopard family pack via his Amazon link and was amazed. The family pack is simply the same as the single user pack (same CD), but the license agreement differs slightly in that it says it can be installed on up to 5 machines in the same household. Why would people do this? It seems to me that Mac users are generally honest people willing to pay for good software. I’ve seen this with my own software where people purchase multiple licenses and I only send 1 serial number (I’ll send more than one if I’m asked, but my automated system only sends 1) and people have asked about installing on more than one machine.
Software isn’t cheap, but it’s good to know that many Mac users do the right thing and purchase software even though it is quite easy to pirate many pieces of Mac software, including Leopard.