Raising an old thread and hijacking it....
I agree entirely. The cost of Rocksim is relatively minor in the grand scheme of this hobby.
I think the problem is that people now expect all software free of charge, and so it looks unaffordable or is a "rip off" when they actually have to pay for it. (You can thank Napster for starting this trend). Gmail is free, iPhone apps are free, MS Office is free at work (for you, not your employer). After this kind of conditioning, well, rocket software should be free, too!
When somebody provides me a good or service, I usually expect to pay for it. I dabbled in software development and sales for a short time, and dammit, I expected to make some money from my efforts. I really don't understand the motivation behind freeware and open source. Yes, I do have my share of free apps and downloads. I just don't understand why developers are willing to do it!
Yes, you're right... someone who develops something of use should be able to expect SOME type or kind of return... some do it for fun or for others (that's why we do hobbies like rocketry, or help TARC teams, or whatever), some do things for profit (sometimes a LOT of profit).
The question is, "Is it worth the money they're asking for it?" That is an individual decision. I bought Rocksim 8 about five or six months before RS9 came out. I loaded it onto my computer, had some issues, asked for advice from Tim Van Milligan at Apogee, after trying a few things, he suggested I uninstall it and reinstall it, finally got it working, after a exchanging probably a half dozen or so emails. At one point, Tim PO'd me pretty bad, when he actually wrote and told me, "Well, that's why you should have bought a MAC." I thought to myself, "Then WHY are you selling a program that's so unstable and full of bugs it won't run on a Windows machine, then?? If it's only stable on a Mac, then why not sell ONLY a Mac version of it??" Course I had the decorum not to tell him that... Then I had some other issues crop up and had to do it again a few months later... of course I had to get a new license file and burn it to disk, and I found my installation disk for the program, the original one I had received from Apogee, had delaminated or something, had a bubble on the surface like the reflective coating was peeling off, and the computer wouldn't read it. Apogee DID send me a new disk and license file free, I'll give them that. I found lots of things that were hard to do, didn't work quite right, and more than a few bugs... For the last 6 months I used it on our old computer, every time I would click the desktop icon to open the program, it would pop up some box with some updating database message or something and then close... click it again and it would finally open. I asked Tim about it in an email and he told me, "well, does it open?" "Yeah, on the second try, usually-- it never updates anything... just gives that message and apparently does nothing but abort on the first try"... "Well", says Tim, "if it opens eventually, don't worry about it." Basically the support was less than stellar, and the comments were uncalled for. When my old computer crashed, I didn't even bother reinstalling it on my "reworked" old computer we used until we could buy a newer laptop. I've had the laptop for a couple years and only reinstalled RS8 on it about a month or so ago for a project I'm working on.
I COULD have updated to RS9 for about $40 bucks extra when it came out. After having a lot of bugs and issues with RS8 for months already, with it working about half the time or so, I just didn't see the point in giving them MORE of my money... They already had about $100 bucks for the RS8. New versions are usually full of bugs, and RS9 had plenty of teething problems, and a lot of fixes, patches, and updates to correct it.
It's a decent program, don't get me wrong. It can do things we never even DREAMED of back in the mid-80's when I was in rocketry the first time... But is it worth the money?? That's an individual decision everyone out there contemplating buying it will have to decide for themselves.
I haven't used OpenRocket, the freeware equivalent of Rocksim, so I can't compare the two. I think a lot of it depends on what you're using it for. If I just wanted to be able to get a decent idea of where the CP was on a rocket, OR would probably do the trick, and save the $100 bucks (or whatever Rocksim is running now). You can do some simulations on OR, though whether they're as good as RS, I don't know...Dunno if OR is as buggy or problematic as RS was for me, or if other folks have experienced the same sort of bugs and problems with RS... I know SOME have, because there used to be a lot of discussion and questions about how to do this or that or how to make something work, or what to do to fix this or that...
I guess *I* just expected to get a product that would work reliably and not be buggy for my $100, and get friendly straightforward help when something went wrong, instead of snide comments from the vendor. I figured that not having gotten the first and gotten too much of the second, they didn't deserve another $40 bucks of my money, especially not to exchange one set of bugs for another...
Like I said, "let the buyer beware and MAKE UP THEIR OWN MIND". That's what happened to me. Hope you're luck has been/will be better!
Later! OL JR