Thanks for your comments.
Here are some of mine:
The benefits of open source are that we can have a discussion like this. It's about openness, sincerity, scrutiny. Try to have a discussion like this with Oracle or Microsoft, and you'll know what I mean. We collaborate, share information, sources, product plans, take code contributions and hire from the community. We are not perfect, so we ask you to help us to get better. The dVPs were invited to the db4o User Conference - paid by db4objects - to join the team and help make the product better.
I think most of you know that db4o is a dual-licensed product - with an open source version and a commercial version. The commercial version is distributed by db4objects, a company that is for-profit and - believe it or not - we are here to make money.
If you are open source/GPL, we are. If you don't want to comply with the GPL, we're not open source and not free either - in this case we're as commercial as you are, though perhaps a little bit more affordable than others. It is as simple as this.
All discussions on this topic are usually by people who want to use the free/open source versions for their commercial/closed source businesses without giving back to the community - either with code or with money. For me that's just free-riding.
As to affordability:
You will always find that some people cannot afford the products they like. I can't afford a Ferrari, even if I like it. I am not going to complain to Ferrari. Either it's important to me - then I go out and get/earn the money - or it's not, then I just can't have it.
But db4o is not as expensive as a Ferrari. db4o is far more affordable than competitors, if you excluse SQL "dumpware", which has been written off by their originators and is now out there in the public domain (and hence not terribly innovative). If this dumpware is "good enough" for you, please do use it, we cannot match that while investing into the product. If you see benefits in OO, then you'll come back to db4o naturally. Compare us with some of the closed source vendors, and you quickly see what I mean.
Some of you use the value-approach for pricing (which we promote, too: Usually we try to capture 3-5% of your software value). Some claim, though, that a few thousand bucks were 50% of their total cost. If this was right, then the entire business was only 2x a few thousand dollars. But how can this be? Even if you live in Siberia, you cannot make a living on this as a company. So you are either not saying the truth or, more likely, you exclude complementary revenue streams, e.g. from services or add-ons, that you cross-subsidize with low cost or free software. These revenue streams, though, should be included in your value approach, and then you'll soon find yourself in the low digit ballpark with the db4o license fees.
I am sorry that we're not able to find a pricing model that pleases 100% of the users. You'll probably never find that. What we can do, though, is to give you software for free under the GPL and to give you several (volume/value) licensing options for the commercial product.
More important, though, is that we remain consistent: We cannot charge one person more than the other. This is unfair and you wouldn't like it, too, if you had paid a fair price yourself, and then see us discounting to your competitor.
Let me know whether this all makes sense to you.
Christof
Christof Wittig ยป db4objects