p2pnet.net News:- "Synergy is a tiny Cocoa application for Mac OS X 10.2 (and later) that puts three buttons to control iTunes in your menubar: previous track, next track, and play/pause; as well as providing you with visual feedback about the currently playing tune."

Made by Wincent software, it, "provides you with ultimate control over iTunes even while you’re working in other applications," it also states on the sales site.

However, it may not be doing this for much longer. Piracy threatens to put an end to it.

In an article, Wincent Colaiuta says there have been serial number leaks but until last month, the problem has more or less under control. However, "Throughout the month of August, a fake license was ‘doing the rounds’ unchecked on a popular serial-sharing forum. Sales dropped 20-30% in response, starting on the day of the leak, and stayed low for the entire month.

"On Saturday, I released a major update to Synergy, version 1.2, and was dismayed to see that the very next day a crack was being made available and advertised on the same forum. When the crack was taken down by Apple, who had been unknowingly hosting it, the very next day a ‘100-user’ license for Synergy appeared on the same forum.

"I have never sold a 100-user license of Synergy. The license if a fake. The serial number algorithm has been reverse engineered, and the pirates can generate new serial numbers at will. There seems to be very little that I can now do, and it seems certain that the 30% depression in sales will continue indefinitely."

So to attract all this attention from Apple app hackers, you’d assume it must be expensive.

You’d be wrong.

It cost around six bucks US.

"The business (and myself) are just two of the victims," the post says, continuing"

"The collateral damage ends up directed at the customers who’ve bought licenses in the past. If the business closes, then there’ll be no more updates for those registered users. No more updates for the pirates either. If the business doesn’t close, things still don’t look good. Unfortunately, every alternative I consider for addressing the problem has a downside attached to it for legitimate users."

A lot of people think they somehow have a ‘right’ to free software, concludes Wincent Colaiuta.

But, "What they have is a right to choose between free software (if it exists) and non-free alternatives. If they don’t want to pay for the non-free alternative, then they have no intrinsic right to use it without payment. Synergy is ‘non-free’, and it is that way because the simple economic reality of the situation is that it costs money to develop and distribute it, money that I don’t have unless people license the software.

"So, to the pirates: if you’d like to avoid paying for Synergy, remember that in doing so you are directly contributing to its end. And along the way, you’re harming other users who have paid the license fee. I hope that you’ll think twice about doing it."

(Thanks Morg)

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See:-

sales site – Welcome to the Synergy website

Wincent Colaiuta – It looks like the pirates have won the war on Synergy, September 13, 2004

This entry was posted on Monday, September 13th, 2004 at 7:24 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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