>I agree 100% with the others on the list. Jon brings up a good point about >Metrowerks subscription practices. I know that Staz and company want to >keep the >product affordable for hobbyist-level people, as well as powerful for >professional developers, but how substantial of a revenue model can you >generate? Jon also makes a good point regarding when was the last time I >forked >any money over to Staz Software? It's been awhile... How many updates have I >gotten? My current FB is version 2.3--probably a minimum of 15 updates, >perhaps >more, for free. How much money would I have paid Metrowerks for the same >number >of updates? Probably 3 years worth of renewals (I didn't renew my >subscription >to CodeWarrior, but that is beside the point). I think if Staz and company analyzed the metrowerks model completely they could make this project self funding as soon as they had a release that was at least good enough to call a "preview" or "developer" release. Call it paying for the privilege to beta test or whatever. Alot of us love being early adopters and being on the painful bleeding edge of technology. Those of us that chose to jump in on a subscription plan would be able to help test thoroughly and start developing various things for the community as freeware or shareware. If the concentration from Staz is just spent on getting the core compiler, ide and debugger done it leaves some holes, like a class library and various examples, that could be a community effort or for some enterprising developer out there that wanted to try his hand at filling the gap. There seems to be very little resistance from anyone on the list to freely share what they have learned and developed. Metrowerks also has something to address to real new entrants to programming or hobbyist's called "Discover Programming with Codewarrior". It's a slightly older version of Codewarrior that only compiles for 68k and has some beginner level books and electronic documentation on the cd, the only real upgrade path being that they buy the full version. The hope is that after someone spends the $79 ( I think) to try it out that they will be hooked on programming and choose to upgrade to the full version. The usefullness of the product for a raw beginner and casual hobbyist isn't diminished much at all. Staz could also follow the Visual Basic method of sales, there are three versions Standard, Professional and Enterprise. They of course go up in price radically from $100 to $500 to around $1300 I believe! Essentially I think this type of option is probably the best way to procede if Staz has any interest in it. The business model seems fairly well proven and in use by practically every development tool company in existance. You continue to generate a revenue stream from the product instead of getting a pile of money mostly at once when everyone upgrades and then try to carefully manage it for the life cycle and next major revenue generating upgrade. The other crazy thing I thought about was quit worrying about the ide and "decouple" the basic compiler and see if you could mash it into a plugin compiler for codewarrior. It means we would have to buy codewarrior but any solution is better than no solution. Plus the codewarrior IDE is pretty nice. Oh well I'm sure Staz has had his fill of great idea's on what to do. I was REALLY looking forward to an object oriented basic on the mac. Good Luck and Best Wishes to Staz and crew! Jon -- I'm just full of ....... IDEAS ... yeah that's what we'll call it. ;-)