hazymat;659905 Wrote:
> Erland,
>
> When I tried to update my plugins and saw the need for a new 'licence
> plugin', I figured you were charging for your plugins now.
>
> Okay, so I thought I would buy them - after all they are good and I
> like them - so I went to your website, and tried to understand how much
> they would cost.
>
> In fact, I tried to understand your pricing structure. Unfortunately I
> was confounded by it. (Or lack of it.)
>
> Do you actually have products, with prices? Or is this donation-ware?
>
I've tried to clarify the "How much should I pay ?" section on the page
you reach when clicking on the "License options" link in the License
Manager plugin, let me know if it's still not clear.
There are prices but I've decided to start with an open price model
where everyone pay what they think it's worth but to avoid really low
unrealistic payments I've defined a minimum price.
Hopefully this result in that people that can't afford much will still
be able to use my plugin while users who can afford will pay a bit more
and due to this make the average payment reasonable to me. My hope is
also that this way users who are using most of my plugins are going to
be willing to pay more than the users who only use two or three of
them. So far the open price model seems to work very good, many users
pay higher than the minimum amounts, but if that turns out to not be
the case in the future I might change to a more strict price model.
hazymat;659905 Wrote:
>
> If it is donation-ware, then why does your explanation on pricing seem
> to suggest that the user is being given the right to use the plugins
> for a period of time that is not even disclosed at the point of
> purchase?
>
As mentioned on the "How much should I pay ?" section on the page
mentioned above you indicate with the amount if you like a unrestricted
license or a license restricted to one year. The reason to offer one
year licenses is to make it possible for users who aren't sure they are
going to use their Squeezebox one year in the future to pay a smaller
amount. So you decide with the amount you pay if you want a time
limited license or not.
The following are some examples (based on the current minimum prices):
- Click the "Free amount payment for all applets/plugins by Erland"
button and enter 80 as amount and you will get a life time license to
all my current plugins/applets. And I'll be thankful that you provide
an amount above the minimum price.
- Click the "Free amount payment for all applets/plugins by Erland"
button and enter 25 as amount and you will get a one year license to
all my current plugins/applets. And I'll be thankful that you provide
an amount above the minimum price.
- Click the "Free amount payment for AlbumFlow" button and enter 20 as
amount and you will get a life time license to AlbumFlow applet.
- Click the "Free amount payment for AlbumFlow" button and enter 10 as
amount and you will get a one year license to AlbumFlow applet. And
I'll be thankful that you provide an amount above the minimum price.
- Click the "Free amount payment for all applets/plugins by Erland"
button and enter 1 as amount and you will typically get a license
period of something like two months for all my current plugins/applets.
I really don't want payments below $5 because it's not worth the time to
manage the license, so due to this the license period for these are
going to be a few months, not more.
- Click the "I want a free evaluation for 30 days" and you will get a
free evaluation license valid for one month, evaluation license can
only be used once for each plugin/applet after that you need to pay to
get a license.
If someone pays and then decide it wasn't worth it, I'll be happy to
offer a refund within the refund period available by PayPal, currently
within 60 days I believe. If someone wants a refund, just mail me with
the PayPal transaction id or account identity used in the payment
together with the reason to why you like a refund.
hazymat;659905 Wrote:
>
> What on earth is that about?!
>
Basically it's about me getting some time to maintain and support the
plugins/applets also in the future. The old voluntary donation based
model didn't really work for this as too few users decided to donate.
I basically had the choices to either:
- Stop maintaining/supporting all the plugins/applets since I couldn't
justify spending the time to do this for free any more
or
- Start charging users and be able to continue maintaining/supporting
the plugins/applets also in the future.
I thought the second alternative was a better option since I know a lot
of user would be sad if all my plugins/applets suddenly stopped to work.
I'm saying it's about time, because getting some income from it will
make it possible for me to work a few hours less on my normal day job
and use these hours to maintain/support the plugins/applets I love
instead. I definitely don't expect to be able to live on the incomes
from plugin/applet sales, the number of potential users are too few,
the main intention is just to make it possible to get some more time to
maintain/support them also in the future.
hazymat;659905 Wrote:
>
> Another thing that isn't quite clear to me. Do you plan to make old
> versions of your plugins available to users, without the need to pay?
> Or will you prevent them from working?
>
- For users running SBS 7.3 or earlier older versions of the plugins
will be continue to be distributed through the SBS Settings/Plugins
tab.
- For users running SBS 7.4 or later only the licensed versions of the
plugins will be distributed through the SBS Settings/Plugins tab.
At the moment all old versions are still available for manual download
and installation from my homepage, I'm not completely sure this will
always be the case in the future but for now they are available. Of
course, the old versions won't be maintained/supported and they
typically doesn't work with the latest SBS version and especially on
Windows there are some issue to install them because of an old bug in
the zip software distributed by Microsoft. To answer your specific
question, I don't intend to explicitly change the old versions so they
no longer work, Logitech handles that automatically by changing all
programming API's in more or less every new release they make. So I
guess it's up to each individual to decide if it's worth to pay the
current minimum amount of $5 per year to keep having maintained easily
installed and supported plugins/applets also in the future.
Finally, it should be said the the plugins/applets are still open
source, so you are allowed to modify them any way you want and even
re-distribute them with or without changes if you like that, you just
have to provide the necessary copyright statement and follow the rules
defined by the GPL/BSD license used by the specific plugin/applet. It's
a common misconception that open source means free from an economical
perspective, it really doesn't, but it does mean that you are free to
modify the source and allowed to redistribute the changes without any
explicit permission from the original author.
--
erland
Erland Isaksson ('My homepage' (http://erland.isaksson.info))
(Developer of 'many plugins/applets'
(http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/User:Erland). If my answer
helped you and you like to encourage future presence on this forum
and/or third party plugin/applet development, 'donations are always
appreciated' (http://erland.isaksson.info/donate))
Interested in music discovery ? See 'Social Music Discovery (SMD)'
(http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?p=656713) project.
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View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=49483
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