499 karma · joined August 3, 2011
Preach it, brotha!
Putting all politics aside... what happens when 25% to 40% of SysAdmins, Devs, etc. are all fired or furloughed between now and December?
What impact does that have on products, companies, and the industry as a whole?
What we decided was this: 1) We're going to be completely up-front about the discount and talk to people about why we are doing it. 2) Companies that offer the same piece of software for multiple platforms often split that software into different editions (Nero is a good example)... and then can offer different prices per platform by just adjusting the specific edition's price. Since we allow people to run our software on any platform we support... we can't do that. But we can do something that is effectively similar.
All that said, we're definitely interested if anyone has ideas on how to do this better. This is merely the best that we've been able to come up with so far.
A simple example:
One of the types of apps you can build with our tool is Python/PyGTK apps. The root benefit here is that, because Python is interpreted, there is no compile time -- when you click "Run" you instantly get to start testing your app out.
Because Python and PyGTK are readily available in just about every distro's repo, this is never an issue. But, on the flip-side, setting up Python/GTK/PyGTK on Win/Mac can be a bit of a nightmare even for the nerdiest among us.
(We provide our "HTML5" web app option as the default option on Mac and Win for this very reason... But, even then, we still get support requests on trouble-shooting someone's Mac where PyGTK just won't work quite right.)
I have also decided that ecaroth is probably a super smart person that deserves at least two fancy trophies. With either bowling guys or tennis guys on top. We're talking FANCY here.
In fact, this reduces fragmentation considerably. (And there is already a community utilizing the pre-cursor to this language.)