I want to throw in a few comments on pricing as a developer of one of the tools mentioned here (West Wind Web Connection).

First I think price of anything under $1000 is negliable in any sort of development project of any size. If you can get a free product and it saves you $1000 but it sucks while the $1000 product actually does the job, are you really ahead of the game? (and I'm not saying the the free product discussed here (ActiveVFP) sucks - so don't start! <g>)

If you are buying a product for serious development you presumably also want good documentation, support and continued upkeep of the software including bug fixes and upgrades etc. While this could happen with free products there's much less incentive to do so. ANything put out for free needs to recover the time and effort in other ways - usually overpriced consulting services.

With a free product there's also isn't any accountability realistically. If something goes wrong and it's not immediately fixable - so what, you didn't pay me anything right?

With price comes at least some amount of accountability and also continued incentive to improve the product and serve your customers.

I've done both - I've built countless tools that I've given out for free to the community. But ultimately these tools get put out and then not necessarily improved or updated on a regular basis, because after all there's not much incentive in that. Building tools is more than just throwing something out as is - it also means packaging the stuff up so it installs easy, building usable documentation and afterwards having the infrastructure in place to support a product. All of these things go beyond just 'building it' too.

You bet there's plenty incentive in the fact that the time that gets into a commercial product comes back in terms of revenue.

As it is I think most of the VFP developer tools available are vastly underpriced for the value that goes into them. Think about tools like frameworks (Mere Mortals, FoxExpress, MaxFrame etc.) that save you countless hours of development time - yet these products cost around $500-700 dollars. Think about a number of the Web frameworks. What is the real value of these products and the time and effort they do save you?

Developer tools aren't quite as commoditized as end user desktop applications because they are helping you do your job as a developer for which you as a developer get paid (in most cases).

Ultimately what matters in products is how well they work, how easy it is to pick up (and this is actually a very important one, one that more often than not will make a sale!), how well it is documented and supported... As sad as it sounds architecture generally takes second place and comes as an after thought...

Price is usually a decision that should be left as a tie breaker.