Tinderbox and Flint – Licensing Schemes

OK, so I decided this is a delicate enough issue so as to merit a post of its own…

–Anyway the scope of my first post on Tinderbox already felt wide enough… That is why it probably is a good idea to have it stop at those two issues and perhaps update it shortly with some additional info…–

Licensing Scheme – Why do I consider this to be a ‘delicate’ issue?

Well, for starters this deals with at least how one individual makes his living… Also, this deals with how one company or individual for that matter, prices his own work… Imho, you need to be extremely respectful when approaching these always sensitive matters.

I run my own show myself and it is never nice to have to bear with gratuitous inelegant remarks on how one prices his own work.

Having said that, it is also true that products and services compete in the marketplace, so once you are in the market and expecting people to buy whatever it is that you are selling… it seems fair enough to say that you need to be open to receiving suggestions, remarks and plain opinions…

Enough with the babbling!… on to the thing…

As of July 2006 Tinderbox will set you back 192 US$.

Those nearly 200 bucks will buy you one perpetual license as well as one year of free upgrades.

Once that initial year passes you have the option of buying additional one year periods of updates at a discounted fee from the regular license one: 92 US$, once again, as of July 2006…

Please note that the App. won’t stop functioning at all… you will just stop at the last version you were entitled to during you’re first year of upgrades, and that would be it. Shouldn’t be a drama if subsequent product updates don’t justify –for you–, the price of upgrading.

A clear example of this would be the latest Tinderbox 3.5.0 upgrade. It came with a bunch of sexy new features you might or not find of use for yourself. Faced with this situation the decision should be simple enough…

But what if the next version release is mainly a bug-fix one… or at least fixes the one bug that has been plaguing your work…?!

We’ve seen some arguing on this very issue recently on versiontracker… On one hand I recognize that I partially agree with some of the arguments laid against this upgrade policy…

One user points out:

(…) “Most of us would rather pay a reasonable fee that is based on performance, ie. the size and importance of the upgrade, rather than an arbitrary milestone like 365 days. (…) I understand the developer needs to make a living, but how do I know the next major improvement isn’t going to be 13 months – and 200 bucks – from now?”

Another one says:

(…) “I think the issue here is not whether to upgrade or not, but what constitutes a rational for upgrading. (The current policy for Eastgate is that you buy the program, then you rent an upgrade license good for one year. (…) Depending on when you purchased your upgrade license you may or may not be able to upgrade for free, and the quantity of upgrades may or may not be significant one depending upon the development of the software.

Frankly my ability to obtain free upgrades stopped at 3.02! A very weird version to max out on and meaning I missed out on many of the internal fixes introduced in 3.03-3.06. Improvements that I think should be expected and FREE for someone who spent $150 for the program.

Tinderbox is a magnificent program, but its licensing is problematic for me and I am very wary of getting caught again with a program whose company may charge me $90 to get more internal updates. My suggestion, please change your license policy to be version based.”

Mark Bernstein himself provides the other way of looking at this:

(…) “Nobody forces you to upgrade.

If you don’t need to upgrade today, don’t! If the new version doesn’t offer you sufficient value, use the old one!(…)

And later on to the second quoted remark above:

(…) “Apparently, you purchased Tinderbox 2.3.4 around the end of 2004. You year of free upgrades include * Tinderbox 2.4.0 * Tinderbox 2.4.1 * Tinderbox 2.5.0 *Tinderbox 2.5.1 * Tinderbox 3.0 * Tinderbox 3.0.1 and *Tinderbox 3.0.2

If we used a “major version” upgrade policy, you’d have received three FEWER upgrades!(…)

Both sides sound reasonable to me.

Ultimately, as I said before, it is Eastgate’s right to decide upon which kind of milestone to set their upgrades policy. And I guess people could complain if this information was buried on some license agreement at it’s section 7, clause #345, paragraph 45… but the plain and simple truth is that it’s not.

This upgrade policy is openly announced everywhere on Eastgate’s website and also openly discussed, as seen above, wherever and whenever it arises.

As of today, Tinderbox’s splash start-up screen says I’ve got four months left of free upgrades…

I guess I’ll have to wait and see how the development of Tinderbox evolves… as well as factor in the real usage of the App. I’m making… and it should be a no-brainer, right?

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Flint is the last guest invited to the party. It is one of these ‘wizards’ I mentioned yesterday that come with the .dmg file, though this one requires an additional paying license.

As stated on Eastgate’s site:

(…)”More than simply a template set or theme, Flint is a tool kit of Tinderbox techniques for integrating styles and Web services into your site.”

This is just an opinion, my personal one and only opinion, but I’m not with Mark on this one. It’s not about it’s price as 19.95 US$ is not, by any means, a large amount of money. But if you are at all into personal information managing tools –read: Devonthink Pro, Omnioutliner, Mori, Notebook (Circus Ponies), etc.–, you’ve already realized that Tinderbox’s price tag is set well above the average.

Not a problem for me. Its Eastgate’s decision as well as the consumers choice… –Which by the way I consciously and happily made…–, and if i may… I’ll add that from the outside it appears to be working for them…

Also, this is not to say that Flint is worth nothing, not at all. But Tinderbox having such a price and licensing scheme, having in mind what we said yesterday about it’s widely reported steep learning curve, wouldn’t it seem appropriate to reward the Client’s loyalty with all the kind of assistance she needs in order to extract the most from the App.?

Should this come from a third independent party, probably my take would be different… But not from Eastgate who is the same sole publisher for both.

Having an easy as possible solution to set up a modern and good looking blog, capable to stack nicely against other initiatives such as WordPress –which is freeware, feature rich and incidentally powers this site…–, would seem like a nice way of keeping the App. attractive and competitive in the market.

This is just my opinion. I’d love to read your comments, if any, for or against it.

All the best, tfserna

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