When I finished writing, debugging and documenting the htm4l macros, I had a total of $35 in my bank account and had a debt of about US$30,000. Yes, I'm poor. I am also living in a country (Spain) whose language I speak badly at best.
For these reasons,
Non-Commercial Use. If you will use htm4l for non-commercial purposes, you are free to download this and all future versions of htm4l for no charge and with no obligation.
There are two ways you can get htm4l:
| First register and then download. Registration will take only a couple of minutes and will help me keep track of the spread of htm4l. You will also be given the option of joining either or both of the htm4l discussion and htm4l new release mailing lists. If you can spare the time, please register and download. |
| If you're in a hurry, or don't like forms, simply download htm4l immediately. |
Commercial Use. If you produce html for your company, or if you are a commercial web page designer, you do not fit this category and I ask that, within a month of downloading, you pay a one-time fee of US$100 for the htm4l macros. Note that you are not being asked to pay for m4. If you run any kind of UNIX system, you should already have a version of m4. If you don't have one, you can get one from the GNU project.
This fee licenses a single individual to produce html using htm4l for commercial purposes. If you wish to acquire a license for many people at a site or working on a project, the license price, in US$, will be:
where x > 1 is the number of people you wish to register.
This fee will enable me to eat. Really. Also, I will be able to do further work producing tools such as htm4l for you. After you download htm4l, I am happy to allow you a month to evaluate the macros. After that, you will hopefully pay for your copy by sending to me, or transferring to my bank account, US$100 or equivalent (see the bank deposit details for how to do this).
To download htm4l, I ask that you please register first. Of course if you read the above non-commercial use paragraphs, you will know that you can trivially avoid this registration. I hope you wont. No-one is going to chase you to pay for htm4l, though your machine's IP address will be in my server's log files... :-)
You can click here to register & download, or read more about what you'll be getting and why you might want to pay for it.
If many hours of saved time through not having to do tedious editing isn't worth $100 of your money, you must work very cheaply.
If you are, for example, the web maintainer at some company, try telling your boss there's a cheap, time-saving, piece of software you want the company to buy. It's usually a simple thing to get a small sum for a software purchase that an engineer wants. I know because I have done this several times. If you are a contracting web designer, and you use htm4l to produce the pages for a contract, please consider adding an htm4l registration fee to your customer's bill.
After paying for your copy of htm4l, you will receive all future announcements about enhancements, new releases, extra macro packages etc. Because the fee is a one-time fee, you will thereafter be free to download new releases for no charge. You may also join the htm4l discussion mailing list.
By paying for your copy of htm4l, you will enable me to justify spending time working on this and other products that might benefit you. For example, I would like to be able to devote time to writing an emacs mode for htm4l. By paying for your copy of htm4l, you are making it possible for tools such as this to be created. If you like htm4l, paying a little for it helps us both.
Please don't send me mail wondering why htm4l isn't free for everyone. I've written tons of free software for people in the last ten years. In fact, if you use a recent version (post-19.28) of GNU emacs, you execute code I wrote every time you invoke the editor.
Times have changed for me, and I am no longer in a position to spend large amounts of time producing software which I give away and which others use to make money. Your company (supposing you work at one) spends money employing people who create its web pages. These web pages are designed to attract attention and, one way or another, make money. If I make it easier for your company to get their web pages built and easily modifiable, I am saving them money. If you use htm4l on a large project, I may save you thousands of dollars. Try it and see if you think I'm right. If you agree, you'll probably have no problem with sending me $100. If you disagree, you pay nothing.
If you have any questions about the availability of htm4l, please feel free to mail me, call me at +34 3 315-1521, or fax me at +34 3 268-4212.