Thanks for answering, and it's nice to know that nearly everyone that could possibly give their opinion in this topic has given their opinion, since it's made this into a rather interesting debate to say the least.
Never the less, I may as well answer some of your points, since I like an intelligent discussion on various forums and what not.
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*blinks* that was a lot of reading, and why include vbcommerce in the post, its free when its released, sures it's encrypted but still free for 1 shop, *cringes* but the core is free, and its not a lite script, all our core mods are free and 1000's of hours building them so end users here and on our site can benifit and I think between dark and I we've done a hella job supporting both on this site and other.
Yes, it's a lot of reading. I do like a minimum of a thousand words in every single article I've written yet, or at least five hundred words, because bite sized articles I find kind of boring. Back to the question, the reason I included vB Commerce in this is pretty much two fold; because the premium editions go on a price scale I last saw in Jive software (aka, rather expensive on a per user basis), and mainly because of the encryption point. In fact, it's the second point that is my key gripe, partly because of three things:
1. Being encrypted, you cannot tell a multitude of important things. Aka, what the code is, what's included in the code (such as ability for developers to disable at any time, security issues and bugs and hidden features), the quality of the code and pretty much every other thing.
2. You can't add any features yourself, integrate it with anything custom coded or fix any bugs you've found yourself, including security issues.
3. Call home via license system. And I've read that on vbcredits.com, which basically means the server needs to connect to your server every single time the script is run, which means sites without such access (aka, on many shared hosts) are completely unable to use the script. Plus, it means if vbcredits ever goes bust, out of existance or the domain is lost, the script is completely useless.
Aka the usual reasons why many people do NOT run encrypted software, and reasons which need to be answered.
And I know you've done a great job and a lot of work (I was hearing of vB Commerce first sometime last year, which means probably over a year of work already, a lot for a modification). I would honestly in that case probably be fine with paying the full price for the most featured packed version if it wasn't encrypted, albeit this seems to be something paid mod authors can't seem to grasp (aka, encryption loses them even more sales than the prices).
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Our general argument as far as pro addons go is if others can make money from our work we should earn a little bit. I think thats fair. People can earn a hell of a lot form our free mods as well which makes up 90% of our work. go figour..
Of course it's fair. I can't really say anything about the rest of your answer, it's saying about the price which I've responded to.
10-18-2008, 07:40 PM
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