And, based on your previously posted sales numbers, that would be 10% of the 15% of roughly 6 million Visual Studio customers that are available. Therefore there are probably a target market of 90,000 customers, that is relatively small. Though, still a large monetary value if you were to successfully charge all 10% around $5 / mo., which would come out to around $450,000 gross a month. However, getting that many companies to sign up for that kind of subscription is probably unlikely without having an inside edge at preemptive to advertise your services. Which of course, shrinks the pie, so the price has to be raised to make up for it which would draw down demand and affect the success of the service. Maybe I’m being negative. :-)

Thanks,
Steve

Event software stories to enjoy….

To follow up, PreEmptive has officially stated that the PreEmptive.Attributes.dll library may be freely distributed with application source code see: http://preemptive.com/blog/archives/162 . In addition, we are providing a version of that assembly that can be included in pre-.NET 4.0 projects here: http://runtimeintelligence.codeplex.com/releases .

We understand the additional friction involved in there being no automated build solution available for open source and community projects and are currently working on ways that we can help with that as well. Keep an eye on this blog as we’ll certainly continue to talk about it here.

Thank you for your feedback.

Thanks for your candid reply. I think your suggestion of using Dotfuscator’s UI to store the attribute preferences could work, although it is not ideal, at least for me. I like being able to do a Find in Sources in my code for all currently defined Features. In the long run, the GPL approach seems to be the best way to go.

Regarding MSBuild integration, I can certainly see its value for Pro licenses, and I’m definitely not advocating that this should be made available in CE. Instead, PreEmptive Solutions could take applications from Open Source projects in order to supply them with some sort of free license that would give that kind of support.

Just my two cents.

Thanks,
Pedro

Thanks for your insightful comments. I’m glad to hear that you found Runtime Intelligence as easy to use as we like to think it is :) I’ve forwarded your comments to some people who I hope will be able to do something about them. You can of course do instrumentation without referencing the PreEmptive.Attributes.dll by defining your attributes in Dotfuscator’s UI (where they will be saved in your config file, which can be stored in your project’s source control repo). Obviously this is not ideal in some situations - going forward I am looking to see the code to our Attributes DLL released under a GPL-compatible license (I personally cannot see a reason not to, as it’s simply a bunch of attribute definitions). As far as build integration, I cannot predict where we will go with that. I’d personally like to see at least command-line support added to CE, but the powers that be certainly see build integration as a motivator for Dotfuscator Pro purchases. We as a company are committed to open source, and I have been and will continue to make sure that open source developers have the tools they need, cost-free and under compatible licensing, in order to help their software succeed.

These two situations will make the proposition a deal breaker, which is a shame, considering the benefit that Open Source projects could reap with little effort (I have completed that effort for Scrum Sprint Monitor, but now I have my hands tied with this situation).

Best regards,
Pedro