In article <ae862a$khc$2@nntp.qnx.com>, Chris McKillop wrote:
“Bill Caroselli (Q-TPS)” <> QTPS@earthlink.net> > wrote:
True. After all, QSSL is a business. They have to make money. I WANT them
to make money. I want them to continue to make wonderful software products
like QNX Version 4 for another 20 years at least.
I do completely agree with this. QNX is somewhat fantastic and it was
love the first time I seen It (6.0). And the price…
- NC “Non-Commercial” - free for download
- SE “Standard Edition” - $4,295 US
- PE “Professional Edition” - $8,695 US
is perfectly reasonable for business but cuts off those people like me
that just wants to experiment and enjoy a fantasting OS. I must admit
that 5000$ is a bit hight for me actually and a bit too hight if I think
I would only use it for testing, stupid things and expertise on a
realtime OS (I would accept istead a ‘NC’ licence for a lower price (say
100$) but that would include the full development suite).
I do understand that you DO business with this, but what could a guy do
with a ‘non commercial’ license?
- expertise with your development suite
- talk about this great stuff around
- port software and produce free software for it (the only admitted
license).
Thus, they grow the actual QNX community IMHO, and, when they’ll start
to make money with it, they’ll pay.
Limiting the actual possibility of the NC distribution may be a wrong
marketing strategy. I do not do marketing but I immagine THIS scenario:
- complete ‘free for NC’ edition
one user downloads it. If feels immediately impressed with it and
starts to download software and mainly develop software for
expertise with it. Since the software must remain free, it actually
“documents” and makes free examples for your OS.
Since it have the best around software (and IDE, a reliable library…)
it starts to be ‘dependend’ 
. Once it starts to do commercial things
it will immediately know WHAT these standard and professional ed. do
provide. As the user would probably use software found onto the
professional ed., there are more probability that it will
immediately buy it instead of asking himself ‘why doing this big
step if I don’t know how I can improve with an IDE?’.
I’ve downloaded and installed the 6.2 release yesterday. I’ve
immediately noted these ‘warnings’ about the license. After that I’ve
started to note those missing things around, like the cross platform
development tools, the dinkum c++ library and so on. As I was using
them, I’m now dependent and I would probably buy immediately at least the
Standard ed., but (as a single) I just cannot efford it.
How an user could remain impressed of your great multiplatform Makefile
strategy if it cannot use it?
As some of my projects was using the dinkum c++ library, I bet that now
(with only g++2.9x and it’s sucking c++ library) I couldn’t compile them
anymore. Even removing the dinkum c++ library only evidence the lack of a
reliable and standard c++ compiler. Sadly, I used 6.x for serveral
months for several hours a day as a pure hobbist and now I feel a bit
spoiled. Tomorrow I’ll probably put back 6.1a again…
These are just my 2c.
Sincerly…
–
wave++ (Yuri D’Elia)
Software Developer @ ubiest.com
