Developer Licensing
As mentioned previously, I have been spending quite a bit of time working distributed caching for .NET (Community Server in particular). There are two main commercial players in the .NET space (prior to Microsoft announcing Velocity) ScaleOut and NCache.
I am in the business of selling software, so I have zero problems paying for something that lets me get the job done and move on to the next thing. However, it drives me nuts when component/server tool companies require licenses simply develop against their product.
As you can see above, NCache wants $500 per developer just to build a solution. This does not include the cost of the software to actually move your solution to production. Since both products have different pricing structures it is hard to tell if one is actually more costly than the other. However, organizations who are most likely to be interested in this will likely have bigger teams and thus potentially incur an additional cost for every hire.
It is a fine line between protecting your bottom line and annoying your users. Developers are much more finicky than your average consumer, so anything you can do to get your software in their hands is a good thing.
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Comments
Anthony on on 6.06.2008 at 10:02 AM
Couldn't agree more. It drives me nuts also. Devs have a lot of sway and ultimately can massively improve a companies product offering.
A developer fee is a complete turn of for me. As is charging for dev and staging/test environments.
I would not expect to have to pay a fee to test drive a car. Nor would I expect to pay a fee to look around a venue with a view to hiring it. Why is software any different?
I like a firms product. I want to use it. Let me play with it for nothing so that I can make a proper decision.
--Josh on on 6.06.2008 at 12:16 PM
I prefer per-developer licensing with no deployment/runtime costs myself. We develop products which we redistribute, so pricing per server simply doesn't work for us. Few if any products are desirable enough for us to incur that hassle.
For most ASP.NET components you can use them free in the development environment, but need a license for each developer in order for your program to use them outside of localhost. That is easy to work with and is my preferred license structure. We wouldn't buy either of the products above unless they also had an unlimited distribution license that was cost-effective for us.
Robert Barth on on 6.06.2008 at 12:25 PM
I much prefer the per-developer pricing model (and no deployment costs). To me, that makes the most sense, but is the most difficult for the vendor to enforce. Run-time licenses are a pain to administer, IMO. However, the per-developer license has the potential for massive abuse (e.g. a contractor, who works for many clients, purchases a single license, and is therefore permitted to develop against that license for each of his or her clients).
The suggestion that a company should neither charge per-developer nor per environment just seems strange. Maybe they should just give the product away? Software is not a car. Car's don't make you more money. Development tools enable you to do work you otherwise would have had to do, and therefore pay for, yourself.
roni on on 6.24.2008 at 6:31 PM
as you mention in your velocity post -
shared cache [http://www.sharedcache.com] is managed, open source and free - why you don't consider to use it?