On 5 Jul, 2009, at 19:57 , Bryan McKay wrote:
> Hi Andrea, Hi Bryan, > I haven't tried the Pro version yet, but the WhiteBoard looks great. > It's the one feature that to me was missing compared to other > products. So this is a great addition... Well done! Congratulations! Thanks :-) > Now that the Pro version is out, what will happen with the Open Source > product? I like Agilo, I'm using it at work with our team, and would > like to continue using it and contributing to Agilo. Will you continue > to make the Open Source version available? Sure, we will never stop the Open Source version, even if we would like to have mor community involvements in the development, testing and support. We also open the development server, expecting a lot of people to comment on bugs, sending patches... but not really much happened ;-) > Licensing isn't cut and dry at all. As far as I'm concerned, in the > open source world, if you use the product you should be prepared to > contribute something back to the product and the community. That's how > the community and the product thrive. Licensing the same product or > one with slightly more advanced features and bundling with services > shouldn't be an issue at all (not everyone wants to participate in an > open source community). I'm not convinced that the product features > should differentiate open source vs commercial, but most certainly the > bundled services should. This was our first approach, and given the fact that we continue to invest a huge amount of time in developing the tool forward, and we have no investors backing us up, we need to find ways to cover at least a part of those costs ;-) > Now the cost... Our industry suffers from the "shoe maker's son" > syndrome. We build applications and software tools for our customers > and charge a mint for them, but absolutely refuse to pay for tools and > services that help us do our jobs better. I've been in this industry > for over 20 years and project after project I've had the same > frustrating experience. In the end we give up the battle and settle on > Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Powerpoint presentations and > shared folders on a network drive as our repository and version > control tool... Reading through the posts and replies here, the > pricing you are suggesting isn't at all unreasonable for a great > product... I agree with you, the question is, we gave so much value for free till now, that some people do not understand what is the value we give on top, and they do not understand - at least not all of them - what is the difference in having an Hosted Agilo instance (performance, maintenance, backup, hot-fixes, availability) or in having a commercial support service :-) So what would you do? Would you pay for Agilo Pro or not? And if how much would you be willing to pay, and how? We are really seeking community advice here, we won't break what already works fine, and the Open Source will stay Open Source. The donation-ware didn't work, the premium services for a very small account of users who clearly said: "We love your product and we want you to develop it further..." :-) Has you said we thought that if you use the Software in Production, you have a special set of requirements, and you'd rather get rid of maintenance and support issues, cause they are not your core business, and if you value your developer, you rather keep them focused on delivering value, than on fixing Open Source tools ;-) So we thought that to pay that price for a whole team is very acceptable, especially if you consider how much an hour of work of one developer costs :-) > Here's my two cents - for those development shops prepared to invest > the time and effort to setup the environment/install the tool > themselves and contribute back to the product/community, the open > source tool is available (maybe even with all the features). For those > who just want to buy a tool with an installer, have the work done for > them, and require ongoing services and support and perhaps bundled > training, the commercial version is available. The commercial version > customers will be the ones raising bugs and requesting new features > and those of us in the open source community will be the ones fixing > the bugs, contributing the new features, and even doing most of the > early testing. Like I said, my two cents... I really love your approach, but in theory - unfortunately - it works, in practice, at least for now, with very poor results. Do you have an idea how many Agilo Registered users we have out there? And do you know how many teams sometimes are hiding behind one registered user only? Well just to give you a feeling, Agilo will have the 10K users birthday probably this month :-) Even if you would only take the 300+ subscribers to the User Group, and you count how many of you really helped out to improve the product and fix bugs... we would still be way below the 10% of those... so community awake and let us hear your voice! We are eager to have feedback and contributions! > Have you considered "enlisting" the support of your open source > community, assigning bugs to be fixed, assigning new features, or > assigning posts/questions to be addressed? I would be willing to "sign > up". In fact, that is how I see the users in the open source community > "paying" for the use of such a great product, by giving something > back... Great, so we are waiting for you :-) If you decide just send me a private email and I will send back the agile42 Open Source contributors agreement, and you will get and SVN account to the Agilo Server. > Are these things of value? Would it help to know other ideas people > have? What about raising these ideas as features for future releases > or raising tickets on issues/defects that users in the open source > community can work on? Sure they are, everything that gets back to the other users is valuable, the question is if we would live the product to the community there would be hardly a development, it would probably die. Of course we do not want it to happen, but it is also hard for us to keep on investing more time than needed to keep it up and running, we do deliver already a great value (at least according to the impartial me and myself :-) ) I feel it will soon go out of topic, but may we will arise some interest out of these posts :-) > Thanks for a great product!! We love it and use it everyday as well :-) > Bryan ANdreaT --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Agilo for Scrum" group. 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