Zoom looks impressive, but it's not nice to charge people for a buggy, incomplete product, especially when the community standard is to keep programs free, even if they are big complicated applications. (See http://ticalc.org.)

Sincerely,
Jonathan Pezzino

Dear Jonathan,

Thank you for your comments about Zoom Algebra. We
appreciate your taking the time to share your opinions
with us.

We’re glad you think Zoom looks impressive. Jeff
Hatch, the inventor of Zoom Algebra and President of
Zoom Math, quit a high-paying job and worked on Zoom
Algebra full time for over six months, rewriting TI’s
built-in functionality from scratch to get around its
limitations.

But to use the colloquial, “You ain’t seen nothin’
yet!” One of our customers has already described the
current edition of Zoom Algebra as jaw-dropping, but
we’re well underway in developing the second edition
which will simply blow you away.

I must admit you hurt our feelings somewhat when you
said that what we are doing is “not nice.” I can
assure you that the two full-time and four part-time
members of our team are all very nice people and that
our intentions are honorable. Could you clarify
further for us what you mean by “not nice?” For
example, do you think TI is not nice for charging for
their calculators which don’t do algebra as well as
they ought to do it?

We’re puzzled that you claim Zoom Algebra is buggy and
incomplete. All commercial software has bugs on
initial release. That’s just the nature of the
business. But so far, only one of our many customers
has come across a bug. We fixed the bug and thanked
him with the promise of a free upgrade to version two.
If you can point out a bug we’re not aware of, that
isn’t an intentional program limitation, we’d be happy
to reward you with a free registration key.

We’re not sure what you mean by “incomplete.” Zoom
Algebra has lots of great features and all we get from
our customers is praise, not complaints. Yes, there
will be even more features in our next release of Zoom
Algebra, but that doesn’t make the first release
incomplete. If it wasn’t finished, we wouldn’t have
put it on the market.

6. Solve:

Code:

WARNING: The introductory version of Zoom Algebra isn't designed for this kind of problem! If you type a fractional equation with a variable in the denominator, you might get an extraneous solution—a wrong answer! To check if you got a wrong answer, just type the same equation again (without pressing CLEAR). If the calculator says "true" now, then the first answer was right. If it says, "Division by 0 is undefined," then the first answer was wrong; the equation you typed has no solution.

This version of Zoom Algebra can't handle square roots, polynomial division, factoring, or quadratic equations. Visit ZoomMath.com in 2006 to see when a version with more features will be available.

We’re sorry you feel that we’ve violated ticalc.org
community standards. However I could not find such a
standard when I visited that website. I found an
article posted in 1999 entitled “The Possibilities of
Calculator Shareware,” and read the article and many
of the community’s comments about it. While many
people felt as you do that all programs should be
free, many other people disagreed. Many were
skeptical that a program could be good enough that a
shareware strategy could succeed. We’re going to
prove them wrong.

Zoom Algebra is not simply a big complicated
application. It’s a new paradigm for calculating.
Our mission is to make calculators easy for everyone
to use. Our market is average math students, not the
intelligent programmers of ticalc.org. We believe
that our program is already the most valuable
calculator software available. One could argue
against us, but our future products will put an end to
any opposing arguments. It would be nice if the
ticalc.org community embraced Zoom Algebra, but if it
doesn’t, we accept that. We do believe however, that
if Zoom Math succeeds as a business, our products will
have a beneficial impact on the graphing calculator
community and inspire other businesses to compete and
create software that benefits the community as well.

Hopefully, TI will recognize the added value which the
Zoom products bring to their calculators. If TI
purchased our company, their extensive marketing
channels could spread out our development costs and
maybe our programs would only add a few cents to the
cost of their calculators. But in the meantime,
development costs have to be paid for in each sale of
our product.

Don’t underestimate what it took to produce Zoom
Algebra. If this was something done in a week as a
hobby, we’d be glad to give it away free. But some
projects are so big that they require financing to
accomplish.

Some day in the future, our company will release Zoom
Calculus. It will be an astonishing program and sell
for less than $100. But it could never happen if we
didn’t have money to pay for its development. If a
student wanted a similar quality calculus application
for her TI-83 Plus, she would have to hire a skilled
programmer for at least two years to create it. Her
total cost would be well over $100,000.

We don't believe students should have to pay $100,000
for top-notch
calculus tutorial software, so except perhaps for
charitable donations to underprivileged schools, we
won’t be giving away Zoom Algebra for free anytime
soon.

At some point in the future, we may need to hire
additional programmers. Would you have any interest
in such a position?

We welcome any further comments you might have.

Sincerely,
Rick Hatch
CEO, Zoom Math

Wow. Charging for programs totally undermines the free sense of the community.

Correction: There is nothng wrong with chraging for a program if and only if the program is really worth the amount that is being charged. In this case, it isn't.

Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible -- just enough to cover the cost.

Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can.

* The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
* The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
* The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
* The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.