This is a question, so please don’t get mad at me. I absolutely agree that people should not profit from something that is available for free and has been created by others hard work, but we do need to ask why people would. This has all happened before in the emulation scene and the main reason it happened, was that it was often to difficult / time consuming to get everything together and setup correctly. I have spent an huge amount of time setting up the software and tables on my virtual pin cab. In truth far far longer than is reasonable. I came to this from the arcade and emulation scene and have lots of friends that I know would absolutely love VP if they got into it. (One friend recently played on my VP and went and bought a real pin!) The problem is I would not want them to have to repeat the amount of effort I have put in getting all set-up right. What we should actually want is people spending the time actually playing and enjoying this wonderful hobby.
I bought my pin cab from ebay with some tables installed and without that I would not be part of this scene. However this wasn’t for profit, the parts for the cab I bought cost more that I paid for it. The seller was just about to build himself a new one. The tables were badly set-up and out of date, so I spent months setting all the software up correctly. I am really happy with the results 
My question is why would people pay for something that is free? Do we need to find a ways to make this far easier for people to get set-up and running well, while still ensuring the authors get the credit they deserve. This hobby is great and I would like to see many more people get involved and enjoy it, but the one thing I have to challenge is the belief that if people don’t put in loads of effort to get it all set-up they are unlikely to contribute. In truth the reverse is true, if it didn’t take so long people would actually have much more time to be able to contribute and there may be many great table builders out there that just haven’t discovered Visual Pinball yet!
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