[Buoh-dev] Wisdom of making widely available on-line comics reader

[jik at kamens.brookline.ma.us (Jonathan Kamens)]

Greetings,

I cam across Buoh today while reviewing today the packages available
for download as Fedora Core Extras.

I wrote an application to do essentially the same thing several years
ago, and I use it to read a number of comics on a daily basis.  I
consciously chose never to make it publicly available, despite the
fact that I have for many years maintained and continue to maintain a
number of freely available open-source software packages.

I made this choice because it seemed obvious to me that if a client
for reading comics directly, without going through the publishers' Web
sites, became widely available, then the publishers would get wise to
the fact that people were reading their comics without seeing their
ads, and they would as a result either modify the structure of their
Web sites to make it harder to download comics directly or start
charging for comics access.  As I'm sure you know, we've already begun
to see this, since one of the major sites (I forget which one) at some
point charging for accessing comics more than two weeks old.

In short, while I think your program is a great idea, the more widely
used it becomes, the more likely it is that it will become useless to
all of its users.  Just something to think about.

  Jonathan Kamens