From all the posts so far what I think it comes down to is that people are afraid that if they use a third party add-on (plugin or encrypted classes) they run a risk of that item being abandoned. This could leave them in a position where they cannot fix the add-on or update their application without a large effort to swap out the abandoned component for something else.
The other seems to be a sentiment that "REAL should provide that anyways". I've had the first case occur and it's troublesome, but not insurmountable. The second I've personally come to realize is not going to happen and third party tools are a necessity. I'd love to buy a language tool and IDE that gave me everything I could ever want, but in 25 years of coding it's never happened and I really doubt it will. Not with MS tools, Java tools, or anything else I've used. Third party add-ons are always a part of the mix whether they are purchased or open source. So it seems the biggest issue is that of risk. Putting in effort and then finding that some component has been abandoned. And how to mitigate that risk ? If there were the possibility of getting source if a component were abandoned would that make you more likely to use a third party component ? What WOULD make you use third party components ? _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
