2006/04/27

Commercial Software


James R has an interesting summary of the DabbleDB talk at STS (actually he and others have done several - sounds like a great conference), but has a couple of asides which I find a bit questionable.....:

[ed. I'll interject at this point - you could use commercial software all the way down, like Cincom Smalltalk, and not pay a dime until large amounts of revenue arrives].
Sure you could, but why not use a free one until you "have to" change - I'd prefer to negotiate from a position of no dependence on a vendor's features. With Squeak you know the deal; but what does "large aounts of revenue" actually mean? When do you sign this contract ( which will be earlier, I assume, than paying money)? In startup mode I can't imagine taking the time to ask these sorts of questions.

"Fascinating little side note when someone asked about using Gemstone. The Squeak connection to Gemstone is not maintained, which would mean moving to VW and getting a license. Which actually demonstrates the value of commercial software - you get support for various things you might want at some point :)"

You get the support which the vendor thinks is commercially viable! Right now Cincom evaluates support for Gemstone to be in its best interests.....


As always there are an array of options for the startup, which is excellent for the market - it will encourage the Smalltalk ecosystem ; but I'm with Avi on the "late binding" commercial approach!

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