CorePlayer regularly phones home or will deactive itself

[Bob Russell]

Betaboy... As I indicated before, your history does indicate a tremendously generous attitude toward users and software and pricing. Tie that together with an outstanding record of creating fantastic software, and I think it's enough for us to keep an open mind, no matter how things look at the moment. I've personally and gladly purchased a copy of CorePlayer for my Treo, even though I don't use it because it's still not up to even the TCPMP quality yet. I figure that I'm more than willing to pay the purchase price (once) in appreciation for TCPMP, and to learn more about CorePlayer. It may even have the potential to become my go-to media player at some point if we can get past all the concerns about server call-backs, license updates, costs of upgrades or complications of moving to another device, etc.

Like a lot of TCPMP fans, I want to believe that the CorePlayer approach is a compromise that makes sense to both CoreCodec and us as consumers. Even if it entails some things that don't look great on the surface of it. And two huge hopes for that remain. First is that an understanding of what choices you made as tradeoffs will be made public and make sense (not everyone will agree, of course, but that's a different matter.) And second is your plans to later offer a free version. Hopefully, that is going to be a capable media player, minus some things that licensing limitations prevent you from offering, rather than a player that's so stripped down it's useless.

I don't think anyone is trying to get in a fight or a legal argument with you, but we are still eagerly hoping for some clarification of things. It seems all sort of hush hush and secret right now. Maybe that's because you guys are incredibly busy putting out the product, and don't have time to clarify yet. Maybe you don't want to reveal too much because of future features coming later. Or even maybe because we aren't looking in the right place for the info. (I know there's some talk in the forums, but not in a form that helps me to make sense of what you are doing and why.)

But at some point the community of buyers is going to want to know some details of what it's all about, and I don't think you will always be the only game in town. Surely, even if just for a pure PR play, you want to get your message out. How about it? MobileRead, mainstream press, Palm Addict, CorePlayer forums or any place of your choice. But please give us a reason to believe and jump on the CorePlayer bandwagon!

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by betaboy

NatCH... as much as i'd like to go into a legal tit-for-tat....

Well I wouldn't like that at all! It'd go over my head real quick.

Nor do I mean to impugn your reputation for openness, not in the least.

As Bob touched on, all I'm trying to do, is to understand the rationale for downgrading the functionality of a paid for application just because it hasn't phoned home lately.

I just can't, of my own imagination, see a good reason for doing that.

I'm actually operating on the assumption/hope that there is a good reason that's just not apparent to me, and was expressing a hope that you might share such reasoning with us, in however general terms you might be limited to.