MacHeist promotion's morality questioned

THE MORALITY of a Mac software distributor, which gives a quarter of its profits to charity, has been questioned by the inventor of Markdown John Gruber.

Macheist last week released a software bundle claiming that it was 'The Week of the Independent Mac Developer'.

The bundle cost $49 which was supposed to be the 'hidden gems' of Apple software that had been showed with awards and accolades. MacHeist said that the bundle was 'about doing what we can to support the community of independent Mac developers'.

However Gruber pointed out that the software involved included the likes of Delicious Library and TextMate which were pretty well known.

Also MacHeist's promotional copy and statements give the impression that the profits from the bundle were going to the developers of the bundled applications. However Gruber said that most of the proceeds are going to MacHeist, and the more bundles they sell, the more disproportionate the profit got.

Some of the developers were offered around $5,000 in a flat fee to flog the software free for a week. MacHeist did not want to negotiate to give a percentage. Others, such as Delicious Monster is getting somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000.

Gruber claims that the outfit giving a quarter of its profits to charity was a very clever move to make profits look lower than they are. Some of the software in the bundle NewsFire and TextMate, would require MacHeist to pay up more if certain revenue levels are reached. Allocating 25 per cent to charity means that it is less likely that the sales will reach NewsFire and TextMate's threshold.

According to the data that MacHeist posted at its site, it flogged 14,000 units and made a total revenue of about $640,000. Armed with a pocket calculator Gruber worked out that the outfit paid developers $70,000 or less. It probably cost it $30,000 to market the bundle and that left the MacHeist team with about $385,000 in profit, which is 85 per cent of the total profits from the promotion.

While he had no problems with resellers making a buck, Gruber said that MacHeist couching this bundle as a service to the indie developer community had got him a bit miffed.

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