While this is an excellent offer because your tool looks very useful, I think I will personally decline it for the following reasons:
#1. Contribution: Your offer tries, but does not really bide well with the open source world. You are offering free use of your tool to open source developers, but what about the rest of our community? They get to use crippleware? We seem to understand the value of providing software with the source code under a non-restrictive license, how about making your contribution in the same way? #2. Free Feedback: Your offer for us to helps give you feedback for free does not make much sense to me and is personally one of my major irks about commercial software and is one of the reasons why I rarely purchase software. Let's see, I purchase your software, find the bugs in it and then tell you about them so that you can fix them so that I can have the privilege of having a piece of software that I purchased actually work the way that it should have in the first place. Something seems wrong with that logic. I think you should be paying me. :-) #3. Free Advertisement: By posting your generous offer here, I'm sure that you were able to quickly advertise your software to at least a few thousand people. If we encourage every software vendor to post here about their 'open source friendly' offers, then we should probably consider renaming this mailing list to [EMAIL PROTECTED] #4. Free Viral Marketing: If the developers of the ASF were to use your software in their projects, then that becomes viral marketing for you and you are able to profit in return for us getting full free copies for ourselves (but not our users) and free feedback and bug reporting. Both of which really cost you nothing since distribution of software is free and easy. #5. Staying Alive: Your first response to all of this is probably something along the lines of being a small software developer who is trying to make money and stay alive. A perfectly respectable goal that I completely understand and respect. However, attempting to make money off of the good will of open source developers goes against our founding principles. Therefore, my recommendation to you would be to advertise and give away your software in places where commercial software development is accepted (ie: corporations, conferences, magazines, etc) and not advertise it in open source forums unless you are going to also give the source code away for free. If you do choose an open source forum, then it should be one with an acceptable license as well. For instance, advertising GPL software in an ASF forum probably won't get you very far. Thanks! -jon -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
