Then jailbreaking would cease to exist because there wouldn't be enough buyers for their product at a price people were wiling to pay.
Right that kind of a model might not work.
What's so hard to comprehend about this concept?
Nothing is hard to comprehend about that concept. No need to get all worked up over it. People can have different view points from you, you know.
Consumers don't look at the salaries of the employees of a company and then decide if they are going to buy their product or service. They look at how much that product or service costs and the value they get from it. If value exceeds purchase price, they buy it. If it doesn't, they don't.
Sure with typical for-profit companies that might be the case. But that's not what I'm talking about. Things don't need to be broken down to a per salary basis. All I am saying is it wouldn't be that complicated for a team dedicated to JBing to say: look, we need X amount of dollars to operate and do this for you, full-time, to insure we can always remain ahead of the curve and have timely up-to-date jailbreaks. Each person only needs to contribute Y, but people can contribute more if they want. Heck, they could even add a few adds to the website to help bring in a few $$$ from google.
Now, someone who wants to benefit from the jailbreak and who sees that kind of a message, who realizes these guys aren't out to make a killing or a profit (which would be proven with open books), would likely be more sympathetic and willing to contribute Y, if they could, then to simply pirate it off some for-profit company that may or may not be gauging its consumers as much as is possible to fill their greedy pockets. The itunes model proved people were willing to pay for music and not pirate it all away like in the Napster days if the money asked for the product was reasonable. The reason Napster was so dam popular was because people were not willing to pay the high prices the music labels were asking for. As soon as a more reasonable alternative presented itself, like itunes, things quickly changed.
That is precisely why many people would be more inclined to "reassess" their value considerations and what they are willing to pay, if they have this additional information to take into consideration. So, if what the dev team is doing and what they are asking for is modest affair, I'm confident things would work out. The quality of the service would speak for itself. You can't tell me a dedicated team couldn't do better than what is being done now. Sure what is done now is fantastic, and we are all grateful for it. But that doesn't mean things couldn't be even better. All we need to do is to help bring that about. We can't rely on the dev team to do everything. Let's make them an offer they can't refuse!
