Stefan Blandow wrote in message <353### [at] 20310318550>...

>This field really is not
>covered in a few sentences, but in short, the 100 000th music record
>of a hit is really cheap in production, its the plastic and a little
>this and that and the GEMA. And thats really like Bill Gates is
>selling his software, oh, and other big software firms.

This is a common misconception I think - and I am not talking about
Microsoft here but about how software is produced in general:

You really can't compare software to music, only because it is delivered on
the same media, a CD.

For music: Once a CD is finished, you only have to do the marketing and sell
it. You can move on to produce the next CD which is then sold *parallel* to
your first one, ond so on, until at the end you got lot's of CDs out, all
selling parallel to each other, all made by the same "development-team": The
artist(s) and technical staff.

For software, that is not possible! The moment a software is on the market,
you already begin developing the next version (or probably even earlier), at
least if you want to stay in business, because software gets old *really*
fast. But in contrast to music, this new version will *replace* the old
version: Once the new one is out, nobody wants to buy the old one anymore!

So what you essentially get is *one* developer-team working on *one*
product. If you want to do a second product, you need a second team. This is
like Madonna taking a CD off the market the moment the next one comes out,
or cloning herself (god forbid!) to work on the next CD.

Actually, software is never finished (like a music CD): If you want to stay
in business, you have to keep working on your software. The versions that
are sold could be seen as "intermediate-releases" on the endless way to the
"never-finished" product.
So the thinking of "once the software is finished it is cheap to put it on
1.000, 100.000 or even 1.000.000 CDs" just doesn't work, because software is
never finished!

>>and b) really
>>most shareware comes nowhere near the commercial products,
>
>Not true for Moray.

Of course not :-) Never said that! See my quote:


>>this is not to say that Moray is crap! Far from that!!!)


Johannes.

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