You should charge $ and make it a commercial proposition if it has commercial value. That'll show developers you are serious and that anything built using your work won't be cast should you ever lose interest or change direction (not that anybody might believe you would change direction ;-) ) and/or rendered obsolete when promised dotNET improvements are delivered. A fair suggestion, and one I'm keeping in mind for the future. But for now, I don't plan to, for the following reasons (no order of importance):
1) I'm involved in MSDN CodeCamp. I presented at the Philly CodeCamp, will likely present at the Harrisburg CC (if they have one), and have communicated that I'll be happy to present at any other ones in this part of the country. A stipulation of CC is that material presented/provided is free.
2) Getting involved with a commerical product is currently off-strategy for me. Supporting a commercial product is very difficult. I will however, provide updates, release notes, take suggestions, and will also have a 2nd version for Whidbey after it's released.
Most of my revenue these days comes from my skills and experience in reporting, T-SQL/.NET programming, general design and documentation, as well as ability to read VFP code. By end of next month I may have 2 new clients that originated from exposure to some of the functionality of this framework.
3) Going back almost 18 years, I've benefited greatly from code/utilities/etc that were offered for free (or no more than the price of a book), yet could have easily sold for much more. Ones that immediately come to mind:
- the fox libraries that accompanied the early Les Pinter books
- the source code for a C compiler that Allen Holub wrote
- the VFP Codebook that YAG published back in 1995
- the works of author and DDJ columnnist Al Stevens
It's always been a personal goal of mine to do something similar, to provide a "how-to" app that that might help others with the learning curve. The set of productivity classes I've built (and accompanying app) are in the general spirit of YAGs CodeBook, which presented a good VFP framework and a small but functional app to demonstrate its use.
Kevin
