Jeff,

My answer would have to depend on your desired end product.

In *very* general terms, ANYTIME you can purchase source code and work from that, even if you end up using little or none of the original code, it's worth the investment -- at the very least, you've learned some of the pitfalls (and solutions to those pitfalls) another developer came across while addressing a similar task. I don't know how you bill your time, but I'm certain that we would charge equally or more than the retail cost of this package to reproduce its functionality. So, in that area, it's a good investment.

One of the questions, though, that must be answered is "would I put *OUR* name on this product, AS IS, without modification?" Knowing this product as I do, probably not -- but that's me (g). Again, without more information about your existing product and the type of clients you're serving, that's extremely difficult to answer. If you need something VERY quick, and you have a competent VFP developer who can jump on this and make whatever changes you need, then it's also a good investment and will most likely suffice for your customer for the moment.

However, the needs of your customer may not (and, most probably, WILL NOT) match this product exactly -- therefore, you'll want someone to dive into this code and learn how it works, write a plan to modify it, make the changes, do some regression testing to see what other things your changes broke...you get the idea. In this case, that might cost more (in both time and funds) than having a competent developer create EXACTLY what your clients need right out of the gate.

I have the following posted in my office: "CORPORATE MENTALITY = There's never enough time to do it right, but there's always enough money to do it over". Consider this carefully.


>In general terms, would you consider it worth the investment instead of starting from scratch? We have an existing VFP software product that needs resource scheduling ASAP.