Quite a while ago Lutz Roeder transferred (sold?) his free .NET Reflector project to Red Gate. The point is not him transferring the project to Red Gate. That was a wise move and I believe he made quite a bunch of money which he deserved, because the tool was excellent (BTW, Lutz now works for Microsoft – if you want to get noticed by cool companies, build something awesome and give it away for free).
The problem is that Red Gate, a couple of months ago, made .NET Reflector a commercial product. To make things worse, the .exe self-deleted itself after users refused to upgrade to the paid version. That is, to put it mildly, outrageous.
That produced at least two results:
- developers are enraged to Red Gate
- a number of free alternatives, many based on Mono, popped up in no time (mushrooms come to mind).
I perfectly understand that a company must generate revenue out of a line of business, and that was the official reason why Red Gate made .NET Reflector commercial, but that decision was, in my opinion, bad on so many levels for the entire company:
- Red Gate’s customers are developers and developers tend to be extremely egocentric and paranoid, and won’t forget about even one single bad decision
- I guess Red Gate is not selling that many licenses of .NET Reflector because of the free alternatives (free+mediocre wins 99% of the times over paid+excellent)
- sales of other products have possibly decreased a bit
- to justify the price tag, Red Gate had to bloat .NET Reflector with some mostly-useless features, which affect the original simplicity of the tool.
Or perhaps I’m wrong and Red Gate is making tons of money.