Blue Sky On Mars

Thoughts on Building Software Products
February 11, 2005

MicroISV and Eric Sink on Transparency

by Kevin Dangoor

Today, I happened across MicroISV, which is a blog for tiny independent software developers. Hey! That’s me! And, by golly, the articles posted there look mighty interesting. One example was a link to Eric Sink’s latest: Tenets of Transparency. Eric is a sharp guy who writes well and raises good points. This article advocates trusting your customers and taking care of them to improve your business.

It’s cool to note that, as part of writing the article, he ended up changing SourceGear’s refund policy! Putting his money where his mouth is indeed.

Update: I just thought I would point out that Ian Landsman’s blog is indeed a good example of a business working transparently.

February 11, 2005

Trolltech license change and eric3 for Windows?

by Kevin Dangoor

With the news that Trolltech has decided to extend its dual licensing strategy to Windows, that means that Windows users will be able to use Qt-based GPLed software for free. That’s great news, because many people use Windows for a variety of reasons, and there are many good Qt-based programs that can now be run there for free.

I use a Mac primarily, but I also use Windows regularly. So, I’ve never given the eric3 IDE a try, because I couldn’t use it cross platform. With the GPL release of Qt for Windows, maybe I’ll be able to. It looks like there is still a question of whether Riverbank Computing will follow suit with a license change for PyQt.