Copying utitities, why the hell not? Options

[mintcar]

What would prevent a couple of deckers from cutting their costs in half by copying eachother´s utitities? Or any programs for that matter?

I totally understand why this is not common practice. Utitities are worth a lot of money after all, and it´s in every decker´s interest to keep it that way. But if two deckers are in the same team, and both of them benefit from the arrangement?

Which brings me to another issue. When a decker has written a utility, shouldn´t he be able to sell a lot of copies while at the same time keeping it for personal use? How do you handle these things?

[mintcar]

OoOps. I just found the rules for copies hidden away in the Street Gear section under Skillsofts (page 295 BBB). Never mind.

[Edward]

Those rules for copy’s only apply if you purchased the program without the source code.

Sometimes you buy utilities with source code so you can modify it to meet changing requirements (SOTA curve on programs) in this case or if you wrote the program your self it is indeed trivial to make an unlimited number of copy’s.

The reason you cant sell these thousands of copy’s is because you know a limited number of people that want the program as you have written it and can afford what it is worth. And you don’t have the contacts to market it to a wider group. (If you did you wouldn’t be a shadow runner you would be a black marked program developer).

What I see as being far more common is a scenario where you write a program and somebody else writes a program and you swap copy’s. doing this with any decker you know moderately well would be a great way to round out your program collection.

For the sake of balance I would add the bug ridden program flaw (mild version) to any program you get in this way. With a 2 PCs swapping code you could ask whey dose it work for the writer and not somebody else. When I was writing programme modules quick and dirty occasionally I would get something that worked fine for me but somebody else would crash when they came and showed me the problems I would think “why would you expect it to act like that” and the same thing happened when I used other peoples code.

The original writer of a program is far les likely to find a bug because he probably didn’t expect the code to be used in that way.

That and game balance

Edward

[mintcar]

I will do exactly that. With the rules for programing combined with the need for ballance you can explain a lot about how decking programs work and why they are so expencive. Also concidering what they are capable of, any player pointing to the availability of pirated programs today are way wrong.

Two players having problems with eachother´s home brewed programs sounds like a great roleplaying opportunity. ;)

[Eyeless Blond]

Note, btw, at least for decker utilities it's *assumed* that your utilities come with source code; you can get a discount for getting only object code.

The reason you can't generally go around selling an infinte number of copies of a tuil you wrote/stole/bought is, frankly, game balance. That and if you get too greedy someone's gonna fry your cracker ass. :P

[hahnsoo]

[Veracusse]

In fact, SOTA is the ultimate game balancer in this regard. If a player were to plaster the market with his utilities, as a GM I would raise the SOTA on him faster than he could get any descent use out of it. If he were just sharing with someone else, SOTA might not raise as fast on the decker if he kept the source code to himself and a buddy. SOTA in general does a lot to balance the deckers in the game, IMO.

Veracusse

[mfb]

someone who spreads good code to all the little boys and girls of the Matrix is going to be fairly well-known, and will probably be easier to track down. you could apply modifiers to Wrong Party tests made during Friend of a Friend tests, as well as to any searches made to find the decker. in GMspeak, that means you've got a handy excuse for having the decker be found by anybody you want to find him (old enemies, con men, whatever).

[The White Dwarf]

That, plus no matter how good the base utility is as soon as it gets widespread it winds up sucking. I mean look at windows, IE, uh.. anything microsoft? The good stuff is always lesser known, soon as it gets widespread it gets diluted.

[ES_Riddle]

Not to mention the fact that you really don't want to buy copies of copies of copies of a program for your top-end deck since any of the previous holders of those copies could have inserted a few lines of code to send anything you download off the matrix to them as well. Hell, they could probably have the program broadcast your ASIST feed to some recording deck somewhere.

Once you finally hit a big score, the decker who has all this info might just blackmail you for all it's worth...