Strings attached
Dammit! Half-assed generosity can be worse than no generosity… I guess over the past years many a closed-source software company has realized that they are faced with increasing competition from the open source market or simply want to gain karma points by handing out freebies. These usually come as dumbed-down versions of their flagship product. I think that’s totally legitimate and am grateful for that generosity. For instance, I’m a long year happy user of the lite version of XMLMind XMLEditor and NetNewsWire Lite - both excellent products that give me so much functionality in their lite versions that I don’t see any need to upgrade to the ‘pro’ version.
Enter Poseidon, a neato Java-based UML Editor and indispensable tool for anyone working with ArchGenXML. They too offer a lite version (dubbed ‘Community Edition’). But instead of just offering that version for download you need to register and apply for a ‘Community Licence’. That’s not too bad in itself, but get this - that free licence expires and needs to be renewed periodically… online, of course - duh!
Which this is why I’m sitting on a train and writing this stupid rant instead of debugging UML, because, of course, the license on my powerbook has expired and I’ve got no way to use Poseidon on this machine until I’m back online again.
So, to all Software companies out there: if you want to gain positive mind share with your freebies — offer them “no strings attached”, everything else will just backfire in the long run, trust me. Thanks for listening, I think my stop is next…
Not so community minded
You can see why they put the expiry code in - the "Community" edition of Poseidon now requires a paid-for key in order to activate any of the "export" functions.
And what's defined as an "export" function? Well, there's export to XMI. And since Poseidon uses zip archives of XMI files as a save format, that kinda excludes "Save As" as well. Oh, and "Save". Just want a bitmap for a quick presentation? Well, you're going to have to use a screen grab, because "Save Graphics" is also disabled. As is "Cut" and "Copy", presumably because if you put all that data in the clipboard, you could paste it into something else, and that's "export".
And the license model has changed from one-time to a subscription model. Yes, that's right, you pay to use it by the MONTH.
Given that they got their atart by forking ArgoUML, an open-source effort, this seems.... well, I'll let you decide. I'm very much persuaded to avoid releasing anything I like under the BSD license though - it just gives people far too much latitude.