I agree, but I don't know if there are easy solutions.

>1) $1000 may be 2-5 days work for U.S. citizens, it may be a year's income or even more for those of us in countries like India. Perhaps another way of pricing this kind of products will develop in a near future. Such an other way of pricing products may also be an effective means of protecting U.S. developers from products developed by those who live in low-cost countries like India.

Unfortunately there's no easy way to deal with this. How would you set this up and more importantly monitor this? The reality is that a small vendor who doesn't have specialized outlets in a given country is unlikely to have separate pricing policies for different countries. The reality of it is that if a product is worth $100,000 to Indians for a $1000 in US funds for the vendor that 100,000 is still $1,000. If you now go and sell that product for $10 you're left with 100th of the revenue. Financially that makes little sense...

Unfortunately that is the dilemma of our world economy were value of money is very skewed...

No easy answers here. Obviously FREE has good value for the people in India in that respect (or - pirating as is the case with many countries).

>2) At times there are freeware products that outperform commercial products on every aspect. An example, at least for me, is InnoSetup versus Installshield. My relationship to the latter is not one of love-and-hate, no, it's only one of hate. Most of us have had similar experiences and when searching for a new tool for a new type of job will evaluate both commercial and freeware products, of course hoping that a free product outperforms every commercial product, like InnoSetup does in my eyes. Also important are the hints that others give. After having evaluated the various products a choice will be made. Price is then one of the factors and for some of us $1000 will amply be a problem, whereas for others it is a major factor, simply because they cannot afford it.

You have to be careful what you term freeware and commercial. InstallShield (especially the one that ships with VFP) is not something you pay for and frankly you do get what you pay for - which isn't much. The full InstallShield Express version is much more powerful and works more reliably but it also costs a fair bit. The full version of Installshield is yet more pwoerful (and complex) and costs even more.

I agree though. Installers is one area I never have understood how a company like InstallShield or Wise etc. can charge thousands of dollars for a product that is relatively simple. This is an extreme case of overpriced software (I can think of a few others like RoboHelp that fall into the same category).

I also agree that there are a number of free tools that have strong community support that are excellent products in and of themselves. However, even the good ones (think Apache, MySql etc.) are usually very rough around the edges and documented worth a crap, and often lack even rudimentary tools for administration. You can get all that but alas you have to pay somebody for *those* tools. This is what I meant in my previous posts in that there's rarely a free lunch - one way or another whatever is free ends up costing more in other respects whether it's time to get up and running or support fees or some feature you have to use a third party tools for that you first need to find and probably pay for.

At the same time realize that there are very few free things that we use in general and those that we do use tend to be major community efforts. For example, the free thigns I use include FireFox, FileZilla.... but beyond that the list starts thinning out pretty quickly. For developers it's very tough to stay focused if you push anything non-trivial out for no money and end up supporting and improving the product.

It's all nice and good to point at the Apache's, Mozilla's etc. tools but these are actually funded projects even if that funding is more communal than with a company. A small company/tool isn't going to have that sort of support.

>3) If one tool could do it all, okay... But look at all the tools that are on the market and that all do an appeal to some wish. If I bought all those tools today, I'd not spend $1000, but $10.000 or even more. And they'd be obsolete next year.

I wasn't really talking about just anything but the core tools you use in an application. If you think about development with VFP especially the core things are likely to be a framework and web framework and maybe a few smaller tools. Given that there's just about nothing that actually costs a $1000 in the fox space you'd probably look at $2000 for a fairly complete set of tools if you bought everything (and you'd probably only use a couple and build some of your own). Still, given US rates of pay that money if these products get used is very low compared to the cost of development.