Mark Hamill
Amarr
Galactic Waste Management
EVE Trade Consortium
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Posted - 2011.06.17 13:48:00 -
[1]
As the developer of EVETycoon, here's my two cents for what it's worth.
I would LOVE to be able to monetize the software I've written. I'd love to get rich off it. Coming up with a scheme where I could just sit and work on software from home all day would be a dream come true. Unfortunately, there's a little voice inside my head (among many others) that says it won't happen.
The EVE community has come to expect certain things, one of those things is a vibrant community of 3rd party developers who do it as a labor of love and provide their apps for free/donations. I wrote ET for me, no one else. It just so happens that others found it useful and I continued to expand it to support their desires. To give you an idea of what they expect, when I first released it as EVEReprocessor some 5 years ago, I had to fend off a FLOOD of calls to make it open source. This is what your community expects.
I do accept donations to help offset my hosting costs and to pay for those shiny toys in my hangar. In 5 years of working on ET I haven't even received a billion isk in donations. ET loses money. If I did try to monetize EVETycoon people would just stop using it. EVETycoon primarily appeals to those traders who do reprocessing to make isk. There are more than I ever suspected but not THAT many. Most of them came to ET after writing their own spreadsheets. If I was forced to purchase a license I'd also be forced to charge real money for ET. I'm not a rich man. I couldn't begin to justify $100 a year and then provide ET for free. If I did charge my users, they'd go back to their spreadsheets faster than they could click the uninstall button.
I'm not at all opposed to your license scheme in principle. I do believe that if you did provide an inexpensive way for small 3rd party developers like me to step beyond donations and into monetization you'd have an even bigger community of developers with even bigger and better apps. If you gave me that OPTION, I might even sit down and rewrite ET into that monster do-all, be-all app. The way you have it structured now, I'd be forced to pull the public plug on ET. Furthermore, why the hell would I pay you $100 a year when, the way you have it written, you don't guarantee me or my users jack **** in return?
EVETycoon Marketing, trading and reprocessing tool. |