Paying for Software

Since a couple of weeks I'm using a desktop application called MarsEdit to write my blog posts. Blogger's editor is pretty okay and I almost never experienced any problems, but it has one drawback: it doesn't let you work offline.

Google is thinking about adding Google Gears support to blogger, but at the moment all you can do is copy your post to a local file and merge it when you are online again. Although I like the simplicity of blogger's editor, I thought I'd give MarsEdit a try. I really liked it from the very beginning. It is simple and easy to use, just as blogger. There was one feature missing though, which was uploading pictures to a specific picasa web album. I decided to post a RFE to their support forum and to my surprise only one day later I got a beta version which let's do exactly what I asked for. MarsEdit is not for free though, you have to pay for it and that's actually wanted to write about in this blog post.

A lot of people, including me a couple of years ago, are not willing to pay for software. They see software as a necessary evil - they can't use their computer without it, so they rather steal it from somewhere than spent money on it. I was so happy in university, that they provided us with free copy of Windows XP. By no means, I would have bought it myself. I would have rather stayed with the previous version. It's not that I didn't have the money back then, it was more of an attitude that software is not worth spending money on.

That attitude change 180° in the last couple of months. Before getting my mac I didn't use any desktop application whatsoever. I used Google Docs for writing my letters and doing my accounting. Gmail served as a mail client and pidigin was my IM application. I didn't need anything else! Getting my mac book pro basically marked "the return to the desktop" for me and with that, happily spending quite some money on applications.

Some of the applications I got were free. However, I still donated a couple of Euros, because I really like them. I don't know where this change of mind comes from, maybe because I'm a software developer. I know how hard it is to develop something sophisticated. Or maybe it's just because it feels good to buy something nice and on a mac everything seems to look nice.