I truly believe that this will be beneficial for everyone.
To state the obvious, there's always a battle in such arrangements between the bottom line and satisfying expectations, and over time, the bottom line always wins when you are playing with someone else's money.
That is definitely true.
One of my top concerns was making sure that my customers' needs be met. I have been working with Barry and Charlie for quite some time now, and am confident that they recognize that my input will be very important to their success. So if anyone is concerned with the way that things are working out, please contact me and let me know.
Your approach to the business to date has been strikingly similar to open source in many ways, and in other ways customer service-centric in nature or just good old fashioned business. Neither one of these maximizes profits, and when it's your baby, you can make the choice between making decisions that generate more money and more customers or greater personal satisfaction whether or not it is in spite of profits.
Barry and Charlie are expecting for this to be a profitable venture (which is the goal of just about every business). While they do plan to grow the business, I feel comfortable that it is going to be at a sustainable rate. Which leads to:
I also recognize the value of the argument that says with more resources, capabilities can be expanded at a much faster rate, and for what you might lose to the bottom line, you gain from these capabilities. There is no doubt that limited resources have impacted capabilities to date, though mostly in terms of management and ease of use and not in terms of spam blocking when in capable hands.
One of the main reasons I decided to sell the business was because of my limited resources. I was only able to devote a few hours a week to improving the Declude products, and was spending way too much time doing everything from accounting to making changes to the web site. Barry and Charlie have better resources to handle the things that don't need my expertise, which gives me time to focus on the software.
I hope that Barry and Charles both understand that Declude is not an inexpensive product and I'm sure that everyone around here expects a continuation of the same principals, or in the very least an upfront disclosure of any plans to derivative from the existing model. Speaking for myself, I've been developing a new business and making decisions based on the existing model, and some changes made at the top can cause my business a great deal of harm. I hope that they also respect the contributions of the community in respect to development, and the value that this represents to the business as a whole. You need look no further than the IMail forum for an example of what happens when you virtually abandon the hardcore followers of a product.
I can't say that there won't be any changes, but I believe that most of the changes will be positive. I am not aware of any major changes to the existing model, but if you have any specific concerns, be sure to ask me.
I've experienced similar changes a few times, and invariably the bean counters win out over the community and their unique needs, though this tends to take some time and these were also big time buyouts. HomeSite for instance followed much the same path to date with Declude, and Allaire then Macromedia teamed up to harm the product from virtually every avenue while adding expense to the users. When I decided to go with Declude for my new business, I really decided to go with R. Scott Perry.
I think one of the main differences here is that I am staying on, and am just as committed to my customers as I was before. So you're still getting R. Scott Perry. While I won't be making all the final decisions, Barry and Charlie understand that there are quite a few people out there that decided to go with R. Scott Perry, and that they all had good reasons for doing that. There may be problems -- but if so, I'm hoping we can anticipate what they might be ahead of time, so I can help avoid them.
My hope here is that the new owners maintain and expand the extensibility of the product by putting as many capabilities as possible in the hands of the power users (expanded external filter support and deep customization), while at the same time I imagine they seek to simplify administration for those with less time and interest, and that they don't change for the worse the way the product is licensed for those seeking high volumes.
I believe that your expectations here will be met or exceeded.
My own biggest concern would be a change at any point in the future that would make Declude significantly more expensive (such as per-user licensing)...
Although I can't make any guarantees here, I do not expect that there will be any significant changes to pricing (or the method of licensing). They recognize that the pricing is part of what got Declude where it is -- priced low enough to be very affordable to most people, while not priced so low that the product can't be supported in the long term.
Regardless of my long-winded cautious optimism, I expect that you got what you deserved from your hard work and very long hours over the years in bringing Declude from it's infancy to what it is now, and for that you get a big (and repeated) congratulations. I'm also very, very thankful that it wasn't Ipswitch, or heaven forbid, Microsoft, that bought you out :)
<G>
-Scott
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