[Voltius]

My Cry-Baby response

Reality Check

Look, I don't mean to be offensive or reply with an attitude but:

• Some of us are in College, others have families to support, and others have apartments to pay for. (who knew us Admins had lives?)
• We have bills to pay
• we have our own lives with plenty of people taking nibbles out of our paycheck.
• Site Admins are NOT rich people
• We already coughed up $160 for vBulletin, and $30 a year for upgrades
• phpbb has a titanic library of mods and hacks all for free, with members and the community all offering support and maintenance
• Look at Coppermine image gallery, FireFox, OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Xoops, Mambo, these people create and maintain some seriously complex scripts and you want to charge money for a stupid HACK? While message board systems like phpbb offer hundreds if not thousands of the same hacks for FREE.
• it seems today that anyone even slightly capable of creating any sort of script wants money for it. AND you want to give them a place, that supports their *greed? (greed is explained below)
• Why? Why, Is everyone so obsessed now-a-days with charging money for things that should be free, and are already offered for free in other places?

*Explination of Greed

*If it's not greed then what is it? Extentions and Hacks for FireFox and Thunderbird & God only knows how many more Programs are all free. With people happily contributing to them without getting any sort of payment. The creators for these scripts & extentions, mods & plug-ins are all proud contributors and as far as I know, I have yet to see anyone ask for money. Donations, yes. But no-where have I seen people ask for payment.

If these free communities can survive then what's the purpose of constantly finding more and more ways to charge people for things that should obviously be free.

Side-Effects

I understand that the creator of ______ Mod or hack has the right to ask for money to suppor thier art, but by you giving them a place to do this, you are incouraging them, and by doing that, it's only a matter of time, before every average hack writer starts charging $$$ for their mod.

What this reminds me of

This is a perfect example of the old days, before OpenSource became popular. Any idiot that knew how to create a "hello world" program, would charge $20 for it. The net, and mostly Download.com (cnet) was filled with some of the most STUPID and simple programs that were all $20. For some reason this price has not changed, a simple icon editing program costs the same as a simple backup program while there are free ones, better ones, with more features out there. Ironic? or Sad?

Giving Yourself AND vBulletin a BAD image

Anyone who takes a look at vB.com ends up here to check out how good the community is. What kind of an image will you be giving them? You might think that by showing off your "commercial services directory" a.k.a. money pillaging service, a proffesional one. But the truth is this, When they see you're charging Green for hacks and mods that phpbb and dozens of others offer for free... Not only are you turning people off to your community, you're giving vBulletin in general a Greedy image. How well will you sleep when you realize it's your service that makes vBulletin look like a dangerous investment? vB.org is probably the most popular and one of the few sites that offers mods and hacks and support for such things. You represent all of us, don't forget that.

Personally, It seems vBulletin is getting to be a very very expensive investment, and I'm begining to slightly regret giving so money for a script that cannot call it'self the most customizable, neither the most stable and secure. A LOT of money, TOO much money, is flying out of my pocket, and I swear right here right now:

I REFUSE to support any commercial hacks that this site offers for purchase, I'll find them somewhere else, I'd rather blackmail one of my script monkey buddies and pay them a few paypal dollars to write me one instead, but supporting this idea is something I refuse.

People need to stop asking for so much. And while it may seem like I'm the one asking for too much. Lets not forget, I'm not the one trying to charge money for services offered elsewhere for free.