Thanks for you support!
This is a major step in the life of PostSharp and it’s community of users. For the last 18 months, as the project has grown and got adopted by a raising community of professional developers, it became clear that we had to switch to a commercial model. As the attempt to make a living from services proofed unrealistic, there was only one option left: to make a living from the sales of licenses, which meant to abandon the open-source model. I must insist to all people whose this decision will make angry or disappointed (a minority, I think, yet possibly vocal): going commercial was the only option if PostSharp were to survive.
In this important moment, let me say a couple of words in personal name.
I am extremely thankful for the support I got from the community. Thank you to the thousands of people who downloaded PostSharp and spent time and energy to integrate it in their project. I am fully aware of the risks and costs of early adoption. Thank you to the hundreds who have taken the time to describe their problems the support forum so that I could make the software better. Thank you to companies who have supported the project financially, either by doing business with me or by making important sponsorships or donations, and especially: Starcounter, X-tensive.com, Omicron and a couple of other I am not allowed to name (thank you, David, Daniel, Peter and Yoav). Thank you Carl and Richard from .NET Rocks for the boost you gave to the project before it got any hype. Thank you Ralf Westphal for your extraordinary and sustained help to introduce me to conferences and magazines. Thanks to all guys who presented PostSharp at conferences or invited (particularly Olaf, Michal, and Szymon). Finally, thanks to the dozens and dozens bloggers who shared their enthusiasm.
It’s only because of your joint support that I found the energy, during these 5 years, to strive for the project.
Introducing SharpCrafters
SharpCrafters is the new company behind PostSharp. SharpCrafters has been founded in September 2009 as a limited company of Czech right.
I am especially proud to announce that Roman Stanek accepted to be a private investor and board member at SharpCrafters. Roman is a veteran startup founder. He is the Founder and CEO of Good Data, a SaaS business intelligence platform. Roman was the Founder and CEO of NetBeans (acquired by Sun Microsystems) and Systinet (acquired by Mercury Interactive and later Hewlett Packard). Roman joined our venture in September 2009.
I warmly introduce Vaclav Svacek, who became managing director of SharpCrafters in January 2010. Before joining SharpCrafters, Vaclav was a Technical Team Lead and Solution Architect at Husky Energy, Canada. Vaclav will now concentrate on operations of the company so I can concentrate on what I am good in: programming. Vaclav, I wish you a lot of courage and perseverance, as taking over a one-man business is not the easiest thing on earth (especially if this one man is as stubborn as I am).
So that’s our team today: two full-time employees (me and Vaclav), and a business angel somewhere between the azure and the clouds of California.
Our short-term business objective is to grow from organic resources to a team of 5, which would be a sustainable size to develop and maintain our product… and would allow me to take some rest. We hope to reach this size within one year. Then, we’ll have the ground to think about further developments and products.
Our Business Model
SharpCrafters is a product company. We provide support services to our products, but we don’t live from services themselves. We believe in win-win deals. When a product is good, both customers and publishers are happy, because none looses time in troubleshooting. From a customer’s point of view, contacting support is a defeat. Living from services is like making profit from the unhappiness your customers. It can’t work (unless your customers are unhappy from someone else’s product).
We want to sell licenses of PostSharp (and other products, in the future) to companies who use it for serious business, and we want these customers to be satisfied. We want to continuously improve the quality of our product so that the time our customers and us spend in support and troubleshooting is minimized.
We want people to learn or experiment with aspect-oriented programming – and we don’t want money from them.
Therefore, we have two editions of PostSharp:
- The Community Edition is free of charges and has a limited set of features.
- The Professional Edition is fully functional and we charge money for it.
How much do we charge? Less than Resharper. See our price list. We have license types for all sizes: personal, commercial, corporate site, corporate global. There’s an optional Support Subscription including free major upgrades and priority support (see our web site for details).
Students, teachers, bloggers… can request free licenses. I repeat: we don’t want your money if you’re not doing serious business with PostSharp. (Oh yes, disclaimer: there is no right to a free license; SharpCrafters will grant them at its sole discretion according to the information provided by the requestor and the information that can be publicly gathered on the web.)
Finally, our business model favors redistribution of PostSharp by third parties, and we’ll make sure that our offer is very affordable to startups.
What’s Next?
There’s still a lot to do before the commercial launch is complete. The next milestones are the following:
- Later this week, we’ll publish a new CTP without hard-coded timebomb and with support for Visual Studio 2010 RC. This new release will support license keys, which means that you can start to purchase licenses :).
- Then, we will update our web site so that you can acquire license keys online. (Currently, we only support manual orders).
- I need to blog about our legacy policies for PostSharp 1.5.
- Finally, we need to complete PostSharp 2.0.
Your Opinion Is Important
We are eager to hear from you. If you have any issue or question with our licensing and pricing model, if it’s just “not working for you”, chances are great that other have the same issue, and we will gladly attempt to address it.
Happy PostSharping!
-gael