VistaDB shutting down because of business operating costs | Hacker News Reader

VistaDB shutting down because of business operating costs

infinitecodex.com

15 pointsfraXis19 comments

> Option – Open Source the Product

> No, Not really an option at all. Who would work on it? Sure lots of people love to consume open source projects, but very few people contribute to them. And I have put a LOT of money into this product, I am not going to just give it away until I can at least break even. I have to put my kids through college, hopefully reclaim part of the money I have put into the company, etc. And lets face it donation type projects never, ever make money. Advertising on the site, etc are all pointless wastes of time.

Um, how is this not an option when terminating the project is? I'm not saying that he should open source anything, but this justification is silly, especially when compared to his previous explicit option of killing and burying the project.

D. Richard Hipp, the SQLite creator, makes a very good living from consulting and support contracts from what I can tell.

"SQLite consortium" membership costs $75,000 a year: http://www.sqlite.org/consortium.html

Every time I see a vendor abandon a product without open sourcing it it becomes that much less likely I'll touch a non-open source product. Got burned that way with Joel S. (CityDesk), not going to happen again if I can help it.

At least he is offering the option to buy the source for some 'fee' while he figures out how he can recover some of his investment. He will also release the 4.1 version without 'activation' so that it will continue to function even if the company shuts down. I think that's reasonable if not an ideal situation.

He has a user on his forum threatening legal action because the user feels like he is being extorted to pay the $699 source code fee to get the latest version with no licensing activation.

He should offer a free upgrade to v4.1 so all the users can still use the software once the company closes down their activation servers. Maybe not a free source code version, but a free upgrade to v4.1 would be in order.

All of the older version users have to activate their version of the software and it will be useless once the activation servers go offline.

"He will also release the 4.1 version without 'activation'"

Not for free, he is forcing users to pay an upgrade price. EXTREMELY shady in my opinion.

does your company pay for dual-licensed gpl/commercial products?

As an individual I would, if of course the payment was for appropriate value.

The concern I'm talking about is ending up with an entirely orphaned product, which is pretty much what this guy is potentially doing since he's not allowing for the possibility of a community developing.

This is particularly bad since his product is an embedded .NET database. The .NET ecosystem is evolving at a healthy rate (compare to the RSN Java 7), especially WRT databases and I suspect it won't continue to be useful after very long. That was also an issue with CityDesk, which is an HTML etc. editor/lightweight CMS, since that is evolving at a healthy clip as well.

I think Jason killed his company himself. He went and moved into a new office and hired a bunch of people. If you don't have the money for that, then don't do it. I believe that if he stayed lean he'd be able to survive.

I am an owner of a VistaDB license and I truly love it, but I am not about to pay $699 for a version that has no activation. I bought the product and if he is going to go out of business and shut down the activation servers, the product I bought will be useless. Garbage! If he is going under, we should be able to get that last release without activation for free. Ridiculous. Jason definitely isn't handling this appropriately. I never liked his paranoid licensing to begin with.

Yes, I believe this, too. He killed his company and his software not focusing on the VistaDB strength being an excellent website database, Xcopy deployable and first of all running in Medium Trust on shared hosting servers. But he wanted simply to high subscription fees and concentrated on implementing his paranoid licensing system to enforce it. No wonder that, as he writes himself, the revenues decreased constantly. Many developers would be ready to pay yearly about $100 without problems but not the amounts he wanted. So his company collapsing is his doing and not caused by wrong behavior of other people (software developer in this case). Geo

I had never really heard of these guys before. But, I'm a huge fan of .Net and wish they could keep going. Open sourcing it would be great but I know I would have a hard time letting it go. I wonder if this thing could have worked in Azure as an in memory DB. You could use it as an interesting type of mem cache.

I have been an actual user of VistaDB for almost 4 years now. Jason who is deciding to close down the company had bought it from the original owners a few years back.

It is really good software, especially if you are a .Net programmer needing a simple database for installation on a customer's computer.

It's a shame how he is handling this.

With you being a fan of .Net, do you have any recommendations for a simple database to use with .Net that can easily be installed onto a customer's computer.

VistaDB was very simple to install. You only had to copy the .dll to the installation directory and it worked.

The SQLite bindings for .NET are excellent. When I need a lightweight database under .NET (or Ruby or Python or C++) that's the first tool I consider.

The new web-enabled version of SQL Server CE that shipped with WebMatrix is shaping up to be a good option. Going that route gives you a great upgrade path from embedded, to the free SQL Server Express, to the more powerful versions of SQL Server if your needs grow.

I'd guess that the new SQL Server CE release this week had something to do with this VistaDB development.

What does "web enabled" mean?

SQL Server CE 4.0, you deploy the DLL with your app, that's it, no configuration, no setup required.

"WebMatrix" not needed.

The version of SQL Server CE bundled with WebMatrix is the first version of SQL Server CE that will run on a web server. Older versions were good for things like desktop apps, but were restricted from functioning in a server environment.

WebMatrix definitely isn't needed to use it afterward (WebMatrix is just an IDE), but is the easiest (only?) way to get the new version of SQL Server CE right now.

What Encosia said is correct, but I wanted to add a link to ScottGu's announcement that explains in more detail:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/06/30/new-embedd...

This announcement moves SQL CE fully into the space where it actually competes with Vista DB (previously CE was primarily used only by desktop/mobile/embedded apps). I wonder if that has any bearing on the decision to kill off Vista DB?

You could not use this or any other file-based db with Azure, as your Azure deployments are read-only.

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