New release of the XLr8 plug-ins for Universe and Unidata

On Aug 14, 1:51 pm, "Jeff Caspari" wrote:
> This is clearly a ploy or 'bait and switch'.

My favorite, recent "bait and switch" is SmartFTP.

It was free for personal use for about 10 years. Then one day it auto-
updated itself, as it often did when upgrades were available, and
informed you that it was no longer free and that your copy would
expire in 12 days.

I wonder how many people paid and how many switched to something
else? I switched to FileZilla, not because I don't think SmartFTP is
worth paying for, but because of the way they went implemented this
policy change.

--
Kevin Powick

That's great, Doug. It's a departure from your OP, which said:
"If you are using the free version you can continue to do so for the near
future"

Thanks,
Jeff


wrote in message
news:c16bbf5a-dd6d-42f5-803a-9cea57c9e8cd-at-8g2000hse.googlegroups.com...
> Jeff,
>
> Those users who downloaded the free version can continue to use for as
> long as they wish. Those users who would like to upgrade or have not
> used it, will have to get a subscription license to use the software.
>
> Regards,
> Doug
> www.u2logic.com

Kevin,

If you are going to use terms like "bait and switch", please do so
correctly. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait_and_switch. Giving
away a product for free is not bait and switch. XLr8Editor was given
away for free for 2 1/2 years. We are now charging a small
subscription fee ($50.00) for the product. The XLr8Editor has a link
to PayPal for payment, see http://www.u2logic.com/XLr8_Editor.html.

Regards,
Doug
www.u2logic.com

On Aug 14, 3:21*pm, Kevin Powick wrote:
> On Aug 14, 1:51 pm, "Jeff Caspari" wrote:
>
> > This is clearly a ploy or 'bait and switch'.
>
> My favorite, recent "bait and switch" is SmartFTP.
>
> It was free for personal use for about 10 years. Then one day it auto-
> updated itself, as it often did when upgrades were available, and
> informed you that it was no longer free and that your copy would
> expire in 12 days.
>
> I wonder how many people paid and how many switched to something
> else? *I switched to FileZilla, not because I don't think SmartFTP is
> worth paying for, but because of the way they went implemented this
> policy change.
>
> --
> Kevin Powick

More like the "warm puppy" than the "bait and switch."

--
frosty

daverch-at-gmail.com wrote:
> Kevin,
>
> If you are going to use terms like "bait and switch", please do so
> correctly. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait_and_switch. Giving
> away a product for free is not bait and switch. XLr8Editor was given
> away for free for 2 1/2 years. We are now charging a small
> subscription fee ($50.00) for the product. The XLr8Editor has a link
> to PayPal for payment, see http://www.u2logic.com/XLr8_Editor.html.
>
> Regards,
> Doug
> www.u2logic.com

>> On Aug 14, 1:51 pm, "Jeff Caspari" wrote:
>>> This is clearly a ploy or 'bait and switch'.

> On Aug 14, 3:21 pm, Kevin Powick wrote:
>> My favorite, recent "bait and switch" is SmartFTP.
>>
>> It was free for personal use for about 10 years. Then one day it
>> auto- updated itself, as it often did when upgrades were available,
>> and informed you that it was no longer free and that your copy would
>> expire in 12 days.
>>
>> I wonder how many people paid and how many switched to something
>> else? I switched to FileZilla, not because I don't think SmartFTP is
>> worth paying for, but because of the way they went implemented this
>> policy change.

On Aug 15, 12:20 pm, "dave...@gmail.com" wrote:
> Kevin,
>
> If you are going to use terms like "bait and switch", please do so
> correctly. Seehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait_and_switch.

Dave,

I'm not sure how correcting my (mis)use of the term by pointing to a
wikipedia article calms anyone that feels hard done by your policy
change, but I'll leave it up to you to manage your public relations.

I wasn't commenting on XLr8, but rather, specifically, how the
developers of SmartFTP made a policy change that didn't sit well with
me, and likely, others.

Getting people "hooked on" a product by giving it away for free then
charging for it at a later date is common in the software industry.
Though, usually, the basic version remains free, and a newly
introduced, enhanced/Pro version is what they begin to charge for.

FTR, I don't use any of the U2 line, so really have little interest in
this thread other than I'm a little bored on a Friday afternoon.

--
Kevin Powick

It seems charging for the XLR8 editor is a strange one - their are
plenty of free ones out there, certainly unidebugger comes shipped
with u2 and is excellent (yes i have used xmlr8 editor and i think it
has some good point and some bad (not least of which the baggage that
comes with eclipse) - also the new u2 IDE is out which has an eclipse
based ide if you are insane enough to want to dev inside eclipse that
is ....

(Reading before final post I see others are in tune with what's got me
bent here but I'll leave this text since I wrote it.)

"Chandru Murthi" wrote:

>Fwiw, Doug, unless there's a specific beef with your marketing and it's
>either deceptive or misleading, I agree with you. There's plenty of software
>I've downloaded free from the web and decided to pay for later if it suits.

That's not what's happening here. We have a choice when we download
shareware and evaluations. Freeware is freeware and you "rarely" (one
out of a couple hundred maybe?) see the model change without upfront
disclosure. Individuals and companies that provide freeware know the
model they will use before they publish, and while you sometimes see
commercial-ware turn free, you usually don't see freeware go
commercial. There is usually a PRO version or some special benefits
to a purchase.

>I don't think, therefore, that is foreign to Pick users, even if Pick
>software is not commonly available this way.

The public response to freeware going commercial usually involves a
lot of moaning, massive migrations, and hard feelings about the
provider. That's not unique to the Pick market and the Pick market
isn't immune to such sentiments either.

XLR8 was originally offered at a very high price - let's call it
U2-scale vs D3-scale pricing. Then the freeware was offered.
Wonderful. And it's absolutely fine if people try the freeware and
then decide to buy for more features, support, or other benefits. It
would have been fine if the freeware was a cut-down version of the
commercial offering - just provide that information in full disclosure
on the website. This is the common model.

The thing that bothers me is that from the beginning when I asked
about the drastic change in the model the question was avoided. I
gave Doug a couple chances to explain what was happening. See the
Google pages and lack of response. (Those URLs do work unless perhaps
you have a hosts entry blocking tinyurl?) It seemed apparent to me
that the rug was going to get pulled out from under the freeware users
at some point - and here we are.




>And, as long as I'm bitching about websites, I note that the u2logic
>website, in spite of being w3chtml4.01 compliant according to the logo at
>bottom (who exactly cares if it is, anyway?) generates a javascript error at
>line 22 on IE. As a requirement of my web development, I set IE to report
>every js error *with an alert*, something that apparently not many do, as
>the number of websites that are unmanageable via my IE is quite high,
>normally I back off to Firefox if I get too many errors. But is begs the
>question...don't web developers check their "error in page" signal? Or just
>don't care as long as it loads and apparently functions?
>
>Is there a solution to this? ie (no pun) setting the browser to report
>errors only on the sites I want it to?


Chandru - I do exactly what you do - I want to see errors. The
percentage of websites with IE-specific issues is extremely high. You
find more of these on LAMP-based websites with a LAMP-oriented agenda
- Linux sites, PHP sites, etc. Microsoft created this problem for us
by not following standards, and while I was optimistic about IE8
fixing this I'm afraid their implementation is probably not going to
help in this area. For a while I was tempted to start using FireFox
on a regular basis when I didn't need IE features. Then I started
reading more about FF-specific issues and realized I was damned either
way. So I threw up my hands, turned off error alerts in IE, and
surfing is ignorantly blissful these days.

Final note on this - I make extensive use of my hosts file to avoid
ads, trackers, etc. I'd guess about 70% of all sites use this stuff
and I was getting script errors constantly as pages could not access
adsense, urchin, etc. I wish I could isolate those errors from real
page coding errors - maybe in another lifetime.


T

On Aug 16, 9:09*pm, Tony Gravagno
wrote:

:*This is like trying to figure out
: what Ross means when he puts everything under the Visage umbrella.

C'mon Tony,

You don't have to look THAT far afield, with the with number of
"Nebula" products that you have released/withdrawn over the years

"Visage" is no different - simply an attempt at branding products
which can be deployed individually to solve discrete problems in such
diverse areas as business intelligence/data exploration, reporting &
electronic distribution, Disaster Recovery/Online Data Replication,
GUI/Web development etc. As people's needs grow & evolve, they can
choose to install additional components of the full Visage suite,
leveraging the products they already have.

Pretty easy to follow really! It's not rocket surgery after all :-)