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Thursday, May 27, 2010

DataObjects.Net editions and prices, final version

Here is the final version of new pricing model I previously announced:


As you may find, we described the same model and prices in much more standard fashion. No more license packs as default option, and consequently, no more Solo Professional license.

The most important difference with standard models is that we sell hardware (HW) licenses, not developer licenses:
  • You should purchase HW license for each machine where DO4 is used during build process.
  • We implied that first developer needs up to 3 HW licenses: two for office and home PCs and an additional one for build/testing agent or CI server, so 3 prepaid HW licenses are included into any edition by default. This is just our implication, but not requirement.
  • 5 and 10 HW license packs are built implying that 80% of licenses there will be used by developers, and 20% - by build/testing agents. Again, this is just our implication.
We hope the prices are reasonable - especially taking into account the amount of time we're ready to spend on support :)

11 comments:

  1. Did you know exactly when (date) you apply this new licencing model?

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  2. We're working on this right now, I estimate we need at max 1 month to apply it, although I hope this will happen earlier.

    ReplyDelete
  3. what about the community edition. Are you going to stop the same in future release or that will also be available in addition to above commercial versions

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  4. v4.2 is Community Edition now ;) We aren't planning to provide any kind of free edition of v4.3 in the near future - this kind of distribution policy gives nothing for us.

    On the other hand, there is a good option allowing you to get a license for almost free: you can write some short sample (likely, you'll be anyway doing this) and publish an article about it on e.g. CodeProject. This will easily bring a set of Professional Edition licenses for 2-3 person team.

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  5. Where can we order a licence?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Alex, i think you are forgetting that from the community of developers is where you create not only knowledge about your product but people begin to appreciate it.

    It would be good to give swag, to .NET communities, because, those are your customers, they determine whether their companies should adopt your product and can effectively tell whether it works. I'm one of the developers that would want to play around with some product before i can recommend it for our mission critical environment. You may ask the winners of the swag to blog about it, and put your company logo as a result of using your product.

    From what i see, like i have said before. Your product seems really nice and in the good direction and deserves commercial value. I think its still quite early to convince most developers to make transitions from their frameworks. There is no tools to make transformations from e.g. NHibernate, XPO, DBTables, datasets to DO.NET. There will be terrible friction and that time cannot be justified in business sense.

    We still see a lot of bug reports in your issue list, and that discourages developers from even trying out because of perception that the bug will prevent them from achieving anything, even if they may not be affected.

    Look at all the other developers of third party tools and frameworks that have succeeded. DevExpress, Telerik and others, they are heavily involved with the NET communities. They sponsor, give swag and market aggressively to the appropriate people.
    I still think the costs for licenses are too high, which groups of developers are you targeting?

    ReplyDelete
  7. > Where can we order a licence?

    We're working on this today - i.e. all the order pages will be updated quite soon.

    > Malisa Ncube said...

    I agree there are still some issues. On the other hand, we're one of companies fixing almost every important issue in days.

    There is really no tools to make transformations from e.g. NHibernate, XPO, DBTables, datasets to DO.NET - but are there such tools for any other framework? - honestly :) IMHO, generating the classes by DB schema is may be just 10% of the problem.

    On the other hand, this isn't the area where we play best. DO is especially good, if you significantly redesign the application or develop a new one. So it's simply not the case for which we must hunt in our niche right now, and definitely not the reason to keep our framework absolutely free.

    I absolutely agree there are strong competitors: Microsoft and Telerik are definitely the strongest ones. DevExpress isn't - XPO has too many limitations to be competitive at all (no composite keys, just integer keys - even this is enough to seriously think about using it). But again, making the product fully free isn't 100% good way to compete with them.

    We aren't greedy. We could keep the product open further, but since that's not our final purpose, we feel it's better for us to make it commercial now. It is already good enough to be paid for. Possibly (even likely), this will positively affect on its positioning.

    Note, that you still have an absolutely free option - v4.2.X branch, that we maintain.

    And finally, about free licenses for .NET community members: please contact us, if you need any free licenses - we'll make a decision in each particular case. You should just describe your briefly describe it.

    ReplyDelete
  8. > Where can we order a licence?

    We're working on this today - i.e. all the order pages will be updated quite soon.

    > Malisa Ncube said...

    I agree there are still some issues. On the other hand, we're one of companies fixing almost every important issue in days.

    There is really no tools to make transformations from e.g. NHibernate, XPO, DBTables, datasets to DO.NET - but are there such tools for any other framework? - honestly :) IMHO, generating the classes by DB schema is may be just 10% of the problem.

    On the other hand, this isn't the area where we play best. DO is especially good, if you significantly redesign the application or develop a new one. So it's simply not the case for which we must hunt in our niche right now, and definitely not the reason to keep our framework absolutely free.

    I absolutely agree there are strong competitors: Microsoft and Telerik are definitely the strongest ones. DevExpress isn't - XPO has too many limitations to be competitive at all (no composite keys, just integer keys - even this is enough to seriously think about using it). But again, making the product fully free isn't 100% good way to compete with them.

    We aren't greedy. We could keep the product open further, but since that's not our final purpose, we feel it's better for us to make it commercial now. It is already good enough to be paid for. Possibly (even likely), this will positively affect on its positioning.

    Note, that you still have an absolutely free option - v4.2.X branch, that we maintain.

    And finally, about free licenses for .NET community members: please contact us, if you need any free licenses - we'll make a decision in each particular case. You should just describe your briefly describe it.

    ReplyDelete
  9. > Where can we order a licence?

    We're working on this today - i.e. all the order pages will be updated quite soon.

    ReplyDelete
  10. > Malisa Ncube said...

    I agree there are still some issues. On the other hand, we're one of companies fixing almost every important issue in days.

    There is really no tools to make transformations from e.g. NHibernate, XPO, DBTables, datasets to DO.NET - but are there such tools for any other framework? - honestly :) IMHO, generating the classes by DB schema is may be just 10% of the problem.

    On the other hand, this isn't the area where we play best. DO is especially good, if you significantly redesign the application or develop a new one. So it's simply not the case for which we must hunt in our niche right now, and definitely not the reason to keep our framework absolutely free.

    I absolutely agree there are strong competitors: Microsoft and Telerik are definitely the strongest ones. DevExpress isn't - XPO has too many limitations to be competitive at all (no composite keys, just integer keys - even this is enough to seriously think about using it). But again, making the product fully free isn't 100% good way to compete with them.

    We aren't greedy. We could keep the product open further, but since that's not our final purpose, we feel it's better for us to make it commercial now. It is already good enough to be paid for. Possibly (even likely), this will positively affect on its positioning.

    Note, that you still have an absolutely free option - v4.2.X branch, that we maintain.

    And finally, about free licenses for .NET community members: please contact us, if you need any free licenses - we'll make a decision in each particular case. You should just describe your briefly describe it.

    ReplyDelete