A few observations after reading the whole discussion so far: Being a third party plugin/classes developer myself (pgSQL4RB) I do understand that some people have a fear of the "what happens if the developer gets hit by a bus?" scenario. Why, I feel the same concern when looking at other third party solutions myself!
However the crude, unemotionally tainted rationale behind choosing to use a plugin or not goes like this: 1. I have a particular need that is not readily available in RB but is provided by a plugin. 2. If I develop everything myself it'll cost me a lot of time. 3. But if I buy the plugin it'll be done 'instantly'. 4. However if the plugin is broken in the future it'll cost me a lot of time to do everything myself, but *I've got nothing to loose* since if I don't use the plugin I'll loose that precious time right away! 5. So I get the plugin and perhaps it'll keep on working and I'll never loose time. If it breaks, I won't loose more time then I'd have lost right away if I hadn't bought it anyway! (And by the time it breaks, if ever, there might be a replacement plugin.) Granted, the reasoning above only works for third party solutions for which you feel you have the skill to duplicate the features by yourself. If a plugin provides functionality that seems over your head then you can really get into trouble should it break some day. It also only works if you derive some income (doesn't have to be much) from using RB and the plugin, otherwise it's less likely you'd want to spend money on top of your RB license. Another observation is that the RB developers, who have expressed their distaste of plugins and build commercial applications, are probably the victim of the same thoughts by their own customers: "Why would I buy that finished application? Maybe it'll break in the future and I'll no longer be able to use the documents I created with it!" So whatever reason you come up with to still convince your customers to buy your application regardless of that concern, applies to you as well when you're considering buying an RB plugin or not... Frankly, when you put everything in perspective it's rather absurd not to use third party help when it will provide you a better return on investment straight away. It gets you jump started. If you'd still want to distrust the plugin and code everything yourself you could still do so by the next release of your application, or the one thereafter... In the mean time you see whether your concept is viable and whether you sell enough copies to even put some more effort into it or not! As a final thought, I really would appreciate as well if RS had a clear and sustained policy of support for third parties. Now they sometimes give the impression to work against them. Marc PS: my take on features needed for the next ListBox, as discussed several years ago on the NUG, is still: keep the current ListBox, add a new control that is a minimalist frame on which anybody can build what he wants. Something that simply provides flexible row heights and column widths, horizontal and vertical scrolling, styled cell contents, possibly with the ability to embed any control in a cell. How it behaves, e.g. how it scrolls or populates itself, would be for each one of us to implement. _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
