As you may find, our goal for this summer is to grow up the community around DO4. Prices and earnings don't really matter for us.
But you may ask:
Why are you asking to pay something at all? The reason is simple: paid money is one of factors making things precious for you. We expect they'll make our simple "promo agreements" more important for both sides.
Why now? Because we feel the product is fully ready to be shown to much wider audience. Right now it can do more than e.g. currently available version of Entity Framework. But I hope by the end of summer it will be capable to simply smash it by the set of its built-in features.
Ok, of course I fully understand it won't be easy to compete with EF. But imagine, if EF would be shipped by someone else rather than Microsoft. I admit it would be really hard to get a big niche on ORM scene with its design. Really, they're providing features almost identical to NHibernate, but packed into "Microsoft way" box. It's really hard to identify what's new there. I'd also say this is dangerous for NHibernate as well.
I feel we're combining something very good both from open source and commercial development by running this campaign. I hope it will help to involve the people. Our purely commercial promo campaign will follow shortly - we'll be spending almost 5 times more on advertisements starting from the next week (I'm waiting for completion of a set of vital changes on our web site & Wiki). But your help is more important - just rumors, posts and articles make such products really famous.
So I suggest you to join our community right now. Together we'll go forward much faster. Ask yourselves:
- What commercial ORM is as open as DO4? We'd say even non-commercial are less open. Open source, availability under GPL, public issue tracker, open plans, Wiki that can be edited by you, possibility to contribute.
- Do you expect EF will ever run on open source platform? DO4 will definitely run on Mono in observable future.
- Is there any chance of getting DO4 development stopped during the nearest years, if we were ready to spend 2.5 years on developing this new version?
- Does DO4 differ from competitors? Even the current feature set shows it is. Architecturally it's completely new. Such schema upgrade layer, support for index storages, built-in IMDB, integrated query engine, upcoming sync - who else have these features?
- What features are expected in near future? There are tons of them on the way. You may find the product you see now, although being solid, shows a huge foundation for upcoming features. And that's cool, because the baby is just 2 week old! Ok, I know, but the pregnancy was long ;)
- Are we devoted to DO4? You must feel it worth much more than just money for us. It is a part of our image and reputation.
- Can you rely on it and on us? I hope, yes - taking into account above, as well as the experience (including support incidents) we've got during previous years of work on 1.X-3.X.
Join DO4 camp!
P.S. Even if you already have a license, think about writing something good about us ;)
