I will make one minor comment about your father. What you are doing is called integrity and honor. As Forest Gump would say: “That’s all I have to day about that.”

From my POV I could really give a shit if RedGate charges or not. I do and will continue to recommend their great products.

But what I will say is that the way they approached handling this was 100% ass backwards. At the end of the CEO’s video he said they have been agonizing over this for 6 months. Maybe the better approach would be to solicit feedback from the community that they greatly affected here.

They could have told the community: “Keeping this product current and alive is costing us more than we anticipated. We would like to start charging. What do ya think.”

By doing this they would have turned made the decision the communities and not one handed down from the great corporation in the sky.

They could have also added something like free for students, OSS developers, etc. Like the GitHub model.

Like I said in my post. This could have been handled better. Now it’s just spilled milk.

To be fair to RedGate, sometimes the deal does change. My original deals with my clients change over time. I don’t charge the same amount that I did 10+ years ago, but when the deal does change it doesn’t happen by fiat it happens by two parties reaching a new deal.

One more thing:

I am very aware of open-source projects in the .Net, and how people give up their time to work on them. Heck, I have some pet .Net OSS projects that I contribute to.

That’s not what I’m talking about. Many OSS projects get “free” contributions from others, but many of those contributions are made outside-of-work. People have their regular 40 hour-a-week jobs that pay them a salary, and then when they go home they write code that they are not paid for.

But what happens when the 40 hours jumps to 60, 80, or more? Or if our family life gets busy for a while? The OSS contributions usually stop. We’re willing to give up some of our free time, but not our jobs, paychecks, and lives.

The difference between our free OSS work and Red Gate is, Reflector is not free. It costs X thousands of dollars a year, real money that Red Gate has to find. They can’t be like us and just take a break working on Reflector

So, no, I think that most .Net developers aren’t willing to give up their work in the same way they expect Red Gate to.

My father used to have a rule: His kids don’t pay for gas when they come to visit him. Of course, that wasn’t the only reason I’d visit him, but he said that was the deal so there’d be none of the “Oh, Dad, it’s ok, I’m fine with money…” at the end of a visit. He said this would *always* be our arrangement.

Some years ago, my father suddenly got sick, and now he has to live in an assisted living center. He’s still capable of paying for my gas, but now when I visit I pay my own way.

Let me ask you this: Should I tell my father ADIAD? Should I rub it in his face that he made a commitment, and demand that he keep his word and hand over $20 every time I see him? And should he feel guilty that he can’t meet his commitment?

Or should we both understand that sometimes situations change, and people have to adjust?

Now I know — this is a personal situation, and you wouldn’t/shouldn’t feel comfortable addressing it. The thing to keep in mind, though, is the fact that this Reflector situation is “personal” for a specific set of people. Red Gate isn’t a website and a random collection of software products that spontaneously appeared, it’s a company run by many *individuals.* People who work a regular work day, then go home to dinner with their familes. They cash their Red Gate paychecks for *money,* which that has to exist and come from somewhere.

If Reflector is not making enough money, someone has to make up the difference in some way. The difference is *real*, and it has to be fixed. If they continue to burn money, their company won’t survive. If they fire workers, they won’t have the product they need to continue to survive, and they’ll have to make personal decisions with individuals that they know and enjoy. What do they do?

Well, Rod says “A Deal is a Deal.” Because of some article posting years ago where they said they wanted to keep a free version (without promising or making any real commitment), the company should continue burning money. How do they continue operating a business engaged in activity that loses money? Doesn’t matter, ADIAD. Should they fire some of their associates or reduce the investment in the product? Sure, whatever, because ADIAD. The deal is, the .Net community continues to get Reflector free, no matter what happens, and that’s that.

Look, it’s fine to want Reflector to be free, and it may be proper to criticize Red Gate for its actions that led to this situation. However, I believe that you and some others in the .Net community have taken this way too far. You are attacking their integrity. You’re making this an issue of morality, but an out-of-context morality where you drop the fact that Red Gate is an organization of *people* who are trying to adjust as things change. Due to the fact that you are a .Net developer, you are owed a download link off of redgate.com, and anything that affects that is WRONG.

The rhetoric against Red Gate really needs to be tempered. It has gone too far.

For what it does, I believe the tool is easily worth $35. I consider myself lucky that it was free for so long.

We now live in an era where people are often not held to account for the things that they say. Need an example: Check out anyone in Congress and see if they have kept their word or not.

Red Gate did say they would keep the product free. Was it binding in any way ? Who knows? It would be costly to attempt to keep them to their word. Yes it is in their rights to change their mind. Does that make it right? Depends on your POV.

As for people working on and giving away code in the .NET community you need to take a closer look: Let’s name a few:
nHibernate, StructureMap, nUnit, nAnt, DotNetNuke.

Now take a look at some other communities that give away free thing:

GitHub (OSS projects are free), Linix, PHP, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Firefox, WebKit, Mono…

As you see there is a model of giving away good and highly complex tools for free.

The real problem with Reflector and what Red Gate did is the lack of alternatives. But lucky for the community there are some alternatives in the works.

Sometimes the best way to make a change like this is to consult the community for advise. When you make a commitment to community it is wise to advise them before making decisions like this.

Of course, for those of us who already pay for ReSharper, they’ve been hinting at adding a ‘Reflector’ into the next version. It’s not free, either, but if you’re already paying for ReSharper, it’s at least one less thing to buy.