On Nov 7, 2011, at 9:51 AM, Christian Franz wrote: > As a developer myself, I can positively state that even if Growl was > commercial we would have supported it. It's not that there are alternatives > (paid or free) available. For example, our software also supports the (paid > for) SpaceNavigator, without getting any kickback. As a developer you support > software that enhances your product - paid or free. I know of no fellow > programmer who would have balked at supporting growl if they made the > front-end paid from day zero. More to the point: I submit *more* > professionals would have supported a PAID Growl in the beginning - simply > because a steady revenue stream indicates that support of the software can be > guaranteed for the foreseeable future, and your investment risk is smaller.
Putting on my hat as a third-party developer for a moment, I have to chime in here as well. As a longtime OS X user and developer whose company was doing a port of an established Windows product, I pushed for the use of Growl instead of our own built-in notification system as we had on Windows. There are things our own homebrew one on Windows can do which Growl cannot -- 'Accept'/'Deny' type buttons in the notifications, for instance -- but I felt strongly that we would do better to support Growl. I initially lost that argument partly pure bullet-point features, but also largely due to the fact that a free and largely unsupported toolkit seemed to my co-workers a risky bet to build our notification solution on. In the end, we went Growl anyway; our first alpha testers immediately howled that they wanted Growl support, because they wanted one single point of configuration and didn't want our notifications stomping other ones generated by Growl. So we changed course. But had it been seen by co-workers as something other than a spare-time project that could be abandoned at any moment, I think we wouldn't even have had to do that mid-course correction. > So, no, I don't think interpreting the OP's point that way has any merit > either. There is no 'fact that many developers' added support growl because > it was free. I think the majority did it in *spite* of it being free. They > took the risk because it was the easiest alternative and provided a standard > - just like you state. I will, however, say that I think a lot of smaller apps support Growl because it's free /to the developer/. There's no license fee to use Growl, no standards check you have to pass. You just download and link against the framework. When the OP talks about 'because it was free,' may refer in part to this. Arguably, Growl 1.3 makes that /even easier/, since before you had to force people to go download Growl to have notifications. (Which led to things like Dropbox or Adobe force-installing their own versions of Growl.) Since the 1.3 framework is still free to use, but contains a mini notification system built-in -- meaning notifications will show even if you /don't/ have Growl installed -- this arguably makes things better.
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