Pros and cons of providing source code
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We have written a few custom controls, which we plan to sell on the web. We are debating whether to make source code available at additional cost. What are the pros and cons of doing so? For us, the biggest 'pro' is that developers would probably be more willing to buy from someone they don't know if source code is available. Is that a reasonable assumption to make? The biggest 'con' is that it exposes us to a huge piracy risk. If source code is available, why would anyone with five seats but more than one copy? Buy one copy plus source, ignore the license agreement, and compile as many as you need. Better yet, compile some for your friends. Are we being paranoid, or realistic? Are people honest enough to play fair, if the pricing is reasonable? What do you do for the software you write? Any and all opinions welcome. We are truly undecided, and all thoughts and suggestions are truly appreciated.
David Veeneman www.veeneman.com
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We have written a few custom controls, which we plan to sell on the web. We are debating whether to make source code available at additional cost. What are the pros and cons of doing so? For us, the biggest 'pro' is that developers would probably be more willing to buy from someone they don't know if source code is available. Is that a reasonable assumption to make? The biggest 'con' is that it exposes us to a huge piracy risk. If source code is available, why would anyone with five seats but more than one copy? Buy one copy plus source, ignore the license agreement, and compile as many as you need. Better yet, compile some for your friends. Are we being paranoid, or realistic? Are people honest enough to play fair, if the pricing is reasonable? What do you do for the software you write? Any and all opinions welcome. We are truly undecided, and all thoughts and suggestions are truly appreciated.
David Veeneman www.veeneman.com
David Veeneman wrote:
The biggest 'con' is that it exposes us to a huge piracy risk. If source code is available, why would anyone with five seats but more than one copy? Buy one copy plus source, ignore the license agreement, and compile as many as you need. Better yet, compile some for your friends.
Unless you're using an agressive form of phone home protection, what's to keep someone from making 5 copies of the sourceless binary while only buying a single seat.
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We have written a few custom controls, which we plan to sell on the web. We are debating whether to make source code available at additional cost. What are the pros and cons of doing so? For us, the biggest 'pro' is that developers would probably be more willing to buy from someone they don't know if source code is available. Is that a reasonable assumption to make? The biggest 'con' is that it exposes us to a huge piracy risk. If source code is available, why would anyone with five seats but more than one copy? Buy one copy plus source, ignore the license agreement, and compile as many as you need. Better yet, compile some for your friends. Are we being paranoid, or realistic? Are people honest enough to play fair, if the pricing is reasonable? What do you do for the software you write? Any and all opinions welcome. We are truly undecided, and all thoughts and suggestions are truly appreciated.
David Veeneman www.veeneman.com
In my experience providing source code helped the bigger companies purchase as they didn't have the worry that you'd go bust and leave them along way up a creek...but a suitably formed escrow agreement could have the same benefit without the added piracy risk.
'--8<------------------------ Ex Datis: Duncan Jones Merrion Computing Ltd
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David Veeneman wrote:
The biggest 'con' is that it exposes us to a huge piracy risk. If source code is available, why would anyone with five seats but more than one copy? Buy one copy plus source, ignore the license agreement, and compile as many as you need. Better yet, compile some for your friends.
Unless you're using an agressive form of phone home protection, what's to keep someone from making 5 copies of the sourceless binary while only buying a single seat.
Even if you have the most aggressive form of phone home protection, source code renders it worthless. This is our concern.
David Veeneman www.veeneman.com
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We have written a few custom controls, which we plan to sell on the web. We are debating whether to make source code available at additional cost. What are the pros and cons of doing so? For us, the biggest 'pro' is that developers would probably be more willing to buy from someone they don't know if source code is available. Is that a reasonable assumption to make? The biggest 'con' is that it exposes us to a huge piracy risk. If source code is available, why would anyone with five seats but more than one copy? Buy one copy plus source, ignore the license agreement, and compile as many as you need. Better yet, compile some for your friends. Are we being paranoid, or realistic? Are people honest enough to play fair, if the pricing is reasonable? What do you do for the software you write? Any and all opinions welcome. We are truly undecided, and all thoughts and suggestions are truly appreciated.
David Veeneman www.veeneman.com
What sort of software is it? If your target is large companies and it controls a huge warhouse or timesheets of something then the source can safely be realeased at purchase. The same probably applies for smaller software in large companies. If your target is small, medium companies then it is relatively ok. Depends on the software type. IF your taget is Individuals or REALLY small companies then i would advise you didnt. (The last one there is obvious, but i like pointing things out):->
Brad Australian Have you tried Rebooting it?
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We have written a few custom controls, which we plan to sell on the web. We are debating whether to make source code available at additional cost. What are the pros and cons of doing so? For us, the biggest 'pro' is that developers would probably be more willing to buy from someone they don't know if source code is available. Is that a reasonable assumption to make? The biggest 'con' is that it exposes us to a huge piracy risk. If source code is available, why would anyone with five seats but more than one copy? Buy one copy plus source, ignore the license agreement, and compile as many as you need. Better yet, compile some for your friends. Are we being paranoid, or realistic? Are people honest enough to play fair, if the pricing is reasonable? What do you do for the software you write? Any and all opinions welcome. We are truly undecided, and all thoughts and suggestions are truly appreciated.
David Veeneman www.veeneman.com
Providing Source will help sales. Piracy? You can't stop that. Also, at least every company I have worked for has been very good about buying software rather than just copying it. So perhaps you are being a tad bit paranoid :)
My pointless rants meragussa.blogspot.com[^]
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We have written a few custom controls, which we plan to sell on the web. We are debating whether to make source code available at additional cost. What are the pros and cons of doing so? For us, the biggest 'pro' is that developers would probably be more willing to buy from someone they don't know if source code is available. Is that a reasonable assumption to make? The biggest 'con' is that it exposes us to a huge piracy risk. If source code is available, why would anyone with five seats but more than one copy? Buy one copy plus source, ignore the license agreement, and compile as many as you need. Better yet, compile some for your friends. Are we being paranoid, or realistic? Are people honest enough to play fair, if the pricing is reasonable? What do you do for the software you write? Any and all opinions welcome. We are truly undecided, and all thoughts and suggestions are truly appreciated.
David Veeneman www.veeneman.com
If you look at different custom control vendors: infragistics, devxpress, codejock, dundas UG/UT etc., they all provide source code. If it was very risky they would not have done so. I buy source code, so that I can figure out why a control behaves the way it behaves. I uses source code over documentation all the time. For MFC/ATL I always use the source code and for .NET I use reflector. That is one reason why I buy source code. One problem you may have with supplying the source code is that it should be very clean. I have discontinued using certain libraries because the code was too messy. Marc Clifton was turned off from DevXPress because of one large source code file. The only one experience where I modified the source code of a third party library turned out to be a bad experience. Since then I have never modified the source code of a third party lib.
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. -Brian Kernighan
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We have written a few custom controls, which we plan to sell on the web. We are debating whether to make source code available at additional cost. What are the pros and cons of doing so? For us, the biggest 'pro' is that developers would probably be more willing to buy from someone they don't know if source code is available. Is that a reasonable assumption to make? The biggest 'con' is that it exposes us to a huge piracy risk. If source code is available, why would anyone with five seats but more than one copy? Buy one copy plus source, ignore the license agreement, and compile as many as you need. Better yet, compile some for your friends. Are we being paranoid, or realistic? Are people honest enough to play fair, if the pricing is reasonable? What do you do for the software you write? Any and all opinions welcome. We are truly undecided, and all thoughts and suggestions are truly appreciated.
David Veeneman www.veeneman.com
If i'm building it into my app, the one that my livelihood depends on, the one that will deprive me of sleep, food, and sanity if it suddenly stops working on all users machines for some arbitrary reason... then you'd better have enough faith in my honesty to trust me to abide by our licensing agreement. In addition, i've learned from experience that having the source can make for improved long-term stability. Portions of one app i work on are over ten years old; portions of others are easily twenty - there are a lot of components that disappear from the market in a fraction of that time. Some things can be easily replaced, others can be patched... but without the source, my options are severely limited. I've spent weeks writing code to patch up memory leaks in 3rd-party code, that would have likely amounted to a trivial change if i'd been able to just rebuild the thing. The downside: if the code is crap, i'll find that out quickly, and likely never buy from you again. :)
I am tired and sleepy that's why i am at office. -- Adnan Siddiqi, The Soapbox's Future
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We have written a few custom controls, which we plan to sell on the web. We are debating whether to make source code available at additional cost. What are the pros and cons of doing so? For us, the biggest 'pro' is that developers would probably be more willing to buy from someone they don't know if source code is available. Is that a reasonable assumption to make? The biggest 'con' is that it exposes us to a huge piracy risk. If source code is available, why would anyone with five seats but more than one copy? Buy one copy plus source, ignore the license agreement, and compile as many as you need. Better yet, compile some for your friends. Are we being paranoid, or realistic? Are people honest enough to play fair, if the pricing is reasonable? What do you do for the software you write? Any and all opinions welcome. We are truly undecided, and all thoughts and suggestions are truly appreciated.
David Veeneman www.veeneman.com
Provide the source code, but do what DevExpress does--there are no comments. 0. Zilch. Not very useful, IMO. Marc
People are just notoriously impossible. --DavidCrow
There's NO excuse for not commenting your code. -- John Simmons / outlaw programmer
People who say that they will refactor their code later to make it "good" don't understand refactoring, nor the art and craft of programming. -- Josh Smith -
Provide the source code, but do what DevExpress does--there are no comments. 0. Zilch. Not very useful, IMO. Marc
People are just notoriously impossible. --DavidCrow
There's NO excuse for not commenting your code. -- John Simmons / outlaw programmer
People who say that they will refactor their code later to make it "good" don't understand refactoring, nor the art and craft of programming. -- Josh Smith -
If i'm building it into my app, the one that my livelihood depends on, the one that will deprive me of sleep, food, and sanity if it suddenly stops working on all users machines for some arbitrary reason... then you'd better have enough faith in my honesty to trust me to abide by our licensing agreement. In addition, i've learned from experience that having the source can make for improved long-term stability. Portions of one app i work on are over ten years old; portions of others are easily twenty - there are a lot of components that disappear from the market in a fraction of that time. Some things can be easily replaced, others can be patched... but without the source, my options are severely limited. I've spent weeks writing code to patch up memory leaks in 3rd-party code, that would have likely amounted to a trivial change if i'd been able to just rebuild the thing. The downside: if the code is crap, i'll find that out quickly, and likely never buy from you again. :)
I am tired and sleepy that's why i am at office. -- Adnan Siddiqi, The Soapbox's Future
Shog9 wrote:
The downside: if the code is crap, i'll find that out quickly, and likely never buy from you again.
I would expect nothing less!;)
David Veeneman www.veeneman.com
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We have written a few custom controls, which we plan to sell on the web. We are debating whether to make source code available at additional cost. What are the pros and cons of doing so? For us, the biggest 'pro' is that developers would probably be more willing to buy from someone they don't know if source code is available. Is that a reasonable assumption to make? The biggest 'con' is that it exposes us to a huge piracy risk. If source code is available, why would anyone with five seats but more than one copy? Buy one copy plus source, ignore the license agreement, and compile as many as you need. Better yet, compile some for your friends. Are we being paranoid, or realistic? Are people honest enough to play fair, if the pricing is reasonable? What do you do for the software you write? Any and all opinions welcome. We are truly undecided, and all thoughts and suggestions are truly appreciated.
David Veeneman www.veeneman.com
we sell source for our toolkits. it's pretty cheap, and about 1/10 of the customers buy it. we try to set the source price high enough to discourage individuals from buying it, but low enough that a company can buy without a second thought - the idea being that a company is going to be more responsible than a hobbiest programmer. we do it because : a) some companies won't buy a toolkit without source b) it helps with debugging and troubleshooting on their end c) people will pay for it piracy is a concern. but ... shrug ... we decided we'd rather sell what we can instead of worrying about it too much.
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we sell source for our toolkits. it's pretty cheap, and about 1/10 of the customers buy it. we try to set the source price high enough to discourage individuals from buying it, but low enough that a company can buy without a second thought - the idea being that a company is going to be more responsible than a hobbiest programmer. we do it because : a) some companies won't buy a toolkit without source b) it helps with debugging and troubleshooting on their end c) people will pay for it piracy is a concern. but ... shrug ... we decided we'd rather sell what we can instead of worrying about it too much.
Any advice on a ratio of source code price to product price? Thanks.
David Veeneman www.veeneman.com
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We have written a few custom controls, which we plan to sell on the web. We are debating whether to make source code available at additional cost. What are the pros and cons of doing so? For us, the biggest 'pro' is that developers would probably be more willing to buy from someone they don't know if source code is available. Is that a reasonable assumption to make? The biggest 'con' is that it exposes us to a huge piracy risk. If source code is available, why would anyone with five seats but more than one copy? Buy one copy plus source, ignore the license agreement, and compile as many as you need. Better yet, compile some for your friends. Are we being paranoid, or realistic? Are people honest enough to play fair, if the pricing is reasonable? What do you do for the software you write? Any and all opinions welcome. We are truly undecided, and all thoughts and suggestions are truly appreciated.
David Veeneman www.veeneman.com
David Veeneman wrote:
For us, the biggest 'pro' is that developers would probably be more willing to buy from someone they don't know if source code is available. Is that a reasonable assumption to make?
Yes. For me, not having sources available for 3rd party code is an "almost no".
David Veeneman wrote:
source code is available, why would anyone with five seats but more than one copy?
Don't charge for seats, charge for support, updates printed manual. I find charging for seats terribly inconvenient anyway. We are a small company, and push around assignments between the people that can do them. This quickly means today I work with the Component X, tomorrow I want someone else to do it, and the next thousand days noone does. I don't feel that justifies purchasing two seats, even though in a strict interpretation I would have to. Of course that doesn't work for all target markets (e.g. large corp with hundreds of developers) You could implement some technical measurens, but balancing them is tricky.
We are a big screwed up dysfunctional psychotic happy family - some more screwed up, others more happy, but everybody's psychotic joint venture definition of CP
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We have written a few custom controls, which we plan to sell on the web. We are debating whether to make source code available at additional cost. What are the pros and cons of doing so? For us, the biggest 'pro' is that developers would probably be more willing to buy from someone they don't know if source code is available. Is that a reasonable assumption to make? The biggest 'con' is that it exposes us to a huge piracy risk. If source code is available, why would anyone with five seats but more than one copy? Buy one copy plus source, ignore the license agreement, and compile as many as you need. Better yet, compile some for your friends. Are we being paranoid, or realistic? Are people honest enough to play fair, if the pricing is reasonable? What do you do for the software you write? Any and all opinions welcome. We are truly undecided, and all thoughts and suggestions are truly appreciated.
David Veeneman www.veeneman.com
In my few excursions into independent work for hire, unrestricted source code was always a given. Except my last contract where I put restrictions (legal, not technical) on the source code. The company who paid me is free to use my source code to develop similar products. They are not free to sell or give away my source code. I retain the rights to use my source code as long as I do not use it for a similar competitive product. Given the specialized nature of the product using my embedded software it is unlikely that they will ever have a use for my source code on any other product. Indeed, if they do I am likely to get the contract to make it work on the new product. Likewise, given the specialized nature of the product using my embedded software it is unlikely that I will find a competitor building a similar product. Read about it here: http://www.hmtown.com/sab.htm#tank and hire me for something. Please.