MacHeist just found a good way to get customers. They should make most of the money in that arrangement.

The developers could have negotiated a better deal for themselves. No one robbed them.

But put yourself in their shoes for a moment. Some unknown website (MacHeist) comes to you offering $5k for you product not knowing if they are going to sell 6, 60, or 16,000+ copies. What deal would you take. If they had the option, it would have been nice to get a percentage (if sales go over the $5k profit mark).

I’m just giving a scenario. I’m sure the terms of the next big deal (through MacHeist or not) will be different for everyone involved since the first was a success.

The developers are happy with the deal. He isn’t. And he just won’t let it go. It’s a non-issue that he refuses to stop ranting about as if it actually impacted him in any way at all.

Gruber is ranting about this because he is the only person on Earth who seems to think that this is worth ranting about. It would be nice if he would go back to anthropomorhizing iTunes or debunking the “always repair permissions when backing up” myth or any of the other interesting or, at the least, entertaining articles he used to write. But no. He spends all of his time these days trolling, naming various people Jackass of the Week (sometimes deservedly so but at least as often not) and directly attacking people who hold differing opinions than his own.

It’s time for him to go back to his old job, because he’s clearly run out of material for his blog.

That or he can put his money where his mouth is. I’ll bet he could easily start a similar promotion of his own (how many DF readers you think would buy a DaringFireball approved set of Mac apps?), take less of the profit for himself (making him the greatest Santa ever) and still end up with enough money from the deal to fund his ranting for another year. If he’s so smart and so much more special than Phil Ryu, why doesn’t he just take matters into his own hands instead of slinging mud across the playground?

I agree with you Stephen about Delicious Library being put along side Disco. Disco is an interesting app. I don’t know if it’s worth $15 or more, but I got it for $5 as a MacZOT, so I don’t feel too bad about getting it. I haven’t used it much, but if someone did a lot of burning of say pictures to CD’s or something like that and didn’t really understand the whole process, I can see Disco being a useful app. Plus it keeps track of the CD’s and their contents.

I wasn’t aware that Gruber had joined the ranks of Kottke and others. I really don’t understand this “Professional Blogger” thing myself. It must work, just look at Weblogs, Inc. They have, what 200 blogs, all cross posting to each other and having very little content. Yet they were able to sell to Time-Warner. Go figure. At least Daring Fireball has some content, not sure of it’s value, but it’s content. I used to read Kottke before he made the move to professional. He just posted links to sites and told us about his daily life. Now, as a professional blogger, he posts links to other sites and tells us about his daily life. Is that really worth paying for?

What was more interesting and that no one seems to be interested in talking about was some of the debate around this about the new Mac development trends (style over substance) of which Disco and Delicious Library are the poster children.

Delicious Library is anything but style over substance. It works, and it works well. It’s a solid piece of programming done right. How they ended up grouped in with Disco is beyond me. I think the quality of Disco speaks for itself, as well as its continuing, non-updated beta status. But you’re correct, this would be a good conversation. It’s far more relevant and important than whether a group of entrepreneurs made money, or whether the sales price of a given piece of software accurately reflects the community’s goodwill, or whether 1,500 new customers equates to an equivalent number of future upgrades. Basically, it’s far more important than this thread.

Frankly, until a participating developer comes forward with a legitimate gripe, this whole thread (and argumen) it is nothing more than irrelevant noise from the cheap seats.

(And yeah, I love Gruber but the quality has been in serious decline lately. I’m holding fast and hopeful for the future, much like the developers who participated in MacHeist. Bless ‘em all for participating in what is an as-yet-unheard-of contribution to charity from the Mac community, and I wish them well in the future. I’ll be renewing/upgrading most of the packages found in the bundle, so I guess I’m the exception to that argument as well.)

To sum up the original Gruber post on the subject, it’s fine and dandy that all the consumers got their bundle of cheap shareware at a steep discount, and it’s also fine that all the developers involved knew what they were getting in on and were happy with the transaction.

What Gruber and others are saying is that profit made by the MacHeist team was obscene 1) compared to the amount paid the developers 2) because of the charity angle used in the marketing and 3) because of the strange way that they spoke of the Mac indie software as both “hidden gems” and “showered with awards and accolades”. This is a necessarily brief summary but hopefully one can understand that there is more going on than Gruber being some kind of torch-wielding troll. It was a statement of opinion that for some reason many people have taken a personal affront to.

What was more interesting and that no one seems to be interested in talking about was some of the debate around this about the new Mac development trends (style over substance) of which Disco and Delicious Library are the poster children. This is a productive thread to talk about because debating and discussing how people use and develop software can influence all Mac users (and given history, all Windows users, too). And obviously the marketing strategy of MacHeist seems to be part and parcel of this “nouvelle vague”.

So as far as I’m concerned, if you bought MacHeist or not, that’s fine. I had been considering Delicious Library and was aware of many of the other applications, so I was seriously considering MacHeist. When the way the finances were being handled was pointed out by Gus Mueller and later Gruber I decided that I would buy two shareware apps I had been considering lately rather than sample a bunch that were mostly redundant to me. I am perfectly happy with Toast, NetNewswire, TextWrangler…and I decided to spend an hour or so and make my own DVD catalog in FileMaker Pro as I am really not interested in scanning the barcodes.

It also seems that not a single developer who participated has complained about the arrangement, which leads me to believe that they did in fact gain something from the promotion and they are happy with the price they paid for it. If they found the experience worthwhile for their own businesses, than apparently it was. What is Gruber’s problem with that?

I used to be a regular reader of Daring Fireball, but lately it seems like he’s been dipping into the crazy cookie jar. It’s like he writes a rant just for the sake of ranting anymore. He used to offer cogent commentary on topics I found interesting. Now he just trolls the Mac community.

First he names the OmniGroup blog as Jackass of the Week because they gave people a much requested product development progress update (and then he twisted the widely-accepted definiton of vaporware to try to justify his stupidity)

Then he jumps on this MacHeist stuff for like two weeks, which otherwise would be quickly forgotten if everyone actually involved in the promotion didn’t have the unmitigated gall to disagree with him. How dare they question his wisdom! He must blog more until the heathens are finally convinced that they are wrong and he is right — surely that will work.

I remember reading Gruber’s blog and enjoying it a great deal at one time in the not too distant past. Now, he just raises my hackles. He’s a professional troll, and he seems perfectly content to impishly insult, deride and attack anyone who dares have a different opinion than he does. And when someone calls him out as the flamebaiting troll that he is, he latches onto them like a pitbull on a twelve-year-old until (he expects) they beg for mercy or he finds another target that better suits his current mood. I still check his blog for links occassionally, but I don’t see any reason to read his commentary anymore. He’s effectively /ignored on my computer from now on.

Or even better… If Gruber thinks MacHeist is such a terrible tragedy for the Mac development communty, why doesn’t he come up with something better, something “more fair” in his eyes? When he does that, I’ll care about his opinion on the matter. Until then, I hope he just shuts up about MacHeist.

Of course, even with the best of intentions, someone can call fraud. I just got a letter today that I am a part of a class action lawsuit because a former employer dared to match my 401K contributions. Everyone who had money in the plan during the 8 year term (probably 100K people) will split 4 million, the lawyers get 1.6 million. Plus, the value of the company stock most people have in their portfolios will go down. Not really related, just a complaint.

His numbers are *not* actual numbers, but “projections” (it came from his mind, not data).

The developers involved all got *exactly* what they wanted to get. The MH people said “Hey, I’d like to include you in a bundle that I’ll pimp for a week, and give you $5,000″. Those developers said “Yes”. No guns were involved.

A charity gained a lot of money it wouldn’t have received had it not been for MH.

MH *is not* a charity. They’ve never claimed that, nor have they claimed to be a non-profit. They made money. Good for them. Perhaps they’ll be able to do it again. Maybe not. Time will tell.

Many, many Mac users got some good shareware at a fantastic price. Some percentage of them will upgrade in the future. Good for them. Good for the developers.

This is a non-story, and I hope Gruber starts writing something worth reading again soon. I’ve found his quality has gone downhill e’er since he decided to go “pro blogger”. Do I continue to read everything he posts? Yeah, I do, because I hope he does get better. I really enjoyed his writing.

As a developer, I have been trying to decide what language I want to commit to for Mac development. I am currently a Java developer, but Mac seems to be Objective-C. So I’m wondering if I even need IDEA since Mac has XCode. Then I wonder why I would need TextMate or BBEdit since the XCode environment seems to cover all a developers needs. Sorry, I digress.

I hear you. That 20% discount on BB is tempting. I bought Textmate with none of these fancy discounts and have been using it for a couple of months now. It is awesome. Give a try. It’s integration with XCode (and just about anything else you can think of) is sweet. I come from a Perl background, so Objective-C is something of a challenge for me. But I’m having fun with it, and that’s all that really matters.