I personally don’t mind the naming of crack.exe. I totally get the gag and I think it’s good to have it. I also don’t mind to explain the policy of V4 extensively to everybody who is asking. But isn’t this issue actually much simpler than this?
Many V4 users (like myself) work professionally with V4, passing the (considerable) licensing cost on to the client, often developing the patches ON (sometimes expensive) hardware owned by the client.
This essentially means: clients pay many €€€€ or sometimes $$$$ for VVVV which go directly to the VVVV-group.
Usually I’m in a healthy and friendly relationship with my contractors and customers, so there is room for humor and it’s no problem to explain situations like this.
But, yes, for me it is easy to understand that there could be lots of ??? if a client (or even the client’s client, who usually has no humor at all) actually ends up finding a crack.exe on HIS own machines that seems to serve software he has paid big €€€€ for.
So I think commercial (paid) versions should simply have a different naming for the lovely crack.exe, because the software has been paid for and is directly intended for commercial use. Stiff department managers of big car companies etc. might also not be the apropriate audience for being lectured about software licensing. At the end of the day those are the people paying for the development of V4, right?
Unpaid, non-commercial, educational versions, in my opinion, should have their crack.exe, hell yes, including the music and little ASCII animations we all love…
Most of the cases when I buy a license for commercial projects I proudly rename it to setup.exe, anyway the patch needs 90% of the cases to stay with the installed by the patcher version of v4. The case with the universities and their admins and staff, well, That’s different - needs some thinking, I guess.
P.s. May be an edu version for the uni, with pink/blue interface for the kids :-) and with the notorious music back and the crack.exe renamed to something friendly, so the students don’t get traumatized from early age
Agreed with all above… why when when we talk about crack.exe and the GUI (for years now in this case, zoom, snap, color etc…) we can feel that nothing is gonna change. The community pay for licences and gives advices based on educational AND professional experience. Which should be taken into consideration or at least deserve more communication between users and vvvv programmers.
in a turbulent series of events (pussy riots being freed, mt.gox going down) the vvvv.org marketing department was sacked for ill-advising the group in the crack-gate affair. effective immediately in alpha builds the affected file is renamed to “setup.exe” in order to reflect its actual innocent purpose of preparing a PC for the startup of the wonderful gift that is vvvv.
thanks again everyone for your reasonable input on the subject. we’re sorry for any inconvenience this obviously unprofessional prank may have caused in the past and look into a sober future. this will happen again…
regarding other off-topic issues that came up in this thread please watch the devvvv-blog for updates.
