September 2, 2002

• I just finished a major update to a REALbasic plug-in I wrote. I did it in a two-day binge of coding inspiration.
  
  Previously, I’ve given my plug-ins away for free, because I enjoy writing them and the market isn’t that huge. In fact, it’s pretty tiny. Now I have in my hands a piece of code that has consumed more than a few man-hours of effort and expense. I’m torn. Free software for the masses? Or software licenses and hassle, but DOLLARS?
  
  It amazed me that, a few versions back, someone who was using my software reported a bug. This wasn’t amazing because there was a bug (there are always bugs), but because he worked for a huge ISP in Holland. They were using it to create installers for their internet suite. Which means that, potentially, every Mac in Holland attached to that particular ISP has my software on it.
  
  On the surface, it’s just a kinda cool thing. Dig even the tiniest bit deeper, and revenue from that plugin might have paid my rent last month.
  
  I’ve come up with all kinds of potential licensing arrangements, and they’re either too simple to actually make me any money, or too complicated for anyone to want to use.
  
  On the easy end, we’ve got something like buying a password to uncompact a password-protected archive. The password gets changed every few days. No muss, no fuss. And if one person buys the password, he can share it with his friends.
  
  On the complicated end, we have time-sensitive licenses that last for, say, six months. They’re per-application, too, so your license code is tied to the application you’re developing. You pay an initial fee for your app’s use of the plugin, and if your app is successful enough for an update in six months (based in part, of course, on your use of my plugin), you can opt to extend the license at a reduced rate.
  
  Somewhere in between is a subscription-based system where you get all updates for six months or a year or something. This is only valuable to a user if I write a lot of plugins and update them all the time. And given the binge-like nature of this last update, that’s not such a great idea.
  
  I wish it could be easy. Each plan challenges me in a different way. I’ve been giving these plugins away for free because I don’t want to have to make this decision. Heh.

  • 4:37 pm
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