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[pixelism]

Woah! I think eveyone should calm down a little and stop giving V-Man and anything-Digital a hard time... I 'm sure they are trying to get it sorted and it's my guess thay are under no obligation to provide a 1.5 native version..

I think we should just be patient and it'll turn up eventually is my guess.. Lets' face it, if it was that easy we'd do it ourselves eh..

I like everyone hopes it will turn up soon.. and I'm sure as soon as they can tell us something they will ..

Well that's my 10 cents..

Looking forward to the release.. or some news

P

[ash74]

I think this discussion has been exhausted already. But I still feel obliged to throw my two cent worth of opinion

Some of the opinions in this thread made it sound that it is the ultimate treason to charge the lowly $5 for an excellent component. They tend to forget that the source code is free for redistribution, and can be used on many many domains (unlike some of the pricey components that come with a key). Another point they tend to forget is the quality of support response both through email and on this forums. Very few others who offer good components for free dedicate this much time for support. IMHO, I think the $5 is a very legitimate and fair price for such a service, if not even a tad cheap.

[patrickmjones]

I have to admit I lost my mind a little when I saw the pay-for-download set up.  Luckily V snapped me out of it.  As a developer I have to admit that the price is indeed very fair.

[V-man]

I have not posted here in a while, but the extra costs associated with co-developing J1.0 and 1.5 versions caused a price bump from $5 to $7, and a download window increase in this plan from 24 to 48 hours.

[artmaster]

Appena comprato

Great work!

[V-man]

The only question I have is if a security release is needed.

If I purchase my one day subscription today and download the files (when subscription is activated) and all is good but over the next few days, weeks or months a security issue is identified with that version will the devs first contact those that have that version to let them know and also will they be able to download the fix at no charge or will we have to again buy a download?

As I noted in my initial response to this post, urgent security issues for JCal Pro will be handled with a free patch. We recently discovered a few low-level security issues with JCal Pro for Joomla 1.0.x. You can see that indeed a patch has been distributed to address this issue. It is available independent of any subscription fee.

[scarng]

we must provide it elsewhere as per the terms of the GPL. We weren't trying to obfuscate our motives. We simply made a business decision, and had to publish the code to stay in compliance with the GPL. No more, no less.

The files you are looking for are in the SVN tab.

http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/jcalpro/scmsvn/

When will the current source be uploaded to JoomlaCode, it states it's been 13 months since you initially published the open source code.   

[V-man]

We stooped doing this a while back now that the GPL row seems to have settled.

Also, we realized that since none of the code is encrypted, a user receives the code when they download the zip file. This satisfies the GPL and delivers the product at the same time.

[scarng]

We stooped doing this a while back now that the GPL row seems to have settled.

Also, we realized that since none of the code is encrypted, a user receives the code when they download the zip file. This satisfies the GPL and delivers the product at the same time.

In order for anyone to enhance the code, they have to come to your site and pay to download it?  How is this open source?

[V-man]

You have downloaded JCal many times. You are free to modify it and release it as you wish. That's the freedom afforded by the GPL license.

The GPL does not restrict costs associated with providing the software, only the freedom to modify and distribute the code once you are legally in possession of it.

[Thor_2002]

Hi,

to get Jcal Pro in your donwnload section it is written: "Access to this archive requires a subscription fee of at least $5 USD."

So if i choose "Subscription" i can only find JCal Pro for 20$.

Where can i get Jcal Pro for 5$ as mentioned in your download section?

[V-man]

Thanks for the note. The $5 annotation is was placed there by the administrators of the Joomla extensions directory (JED) and I have no direct control over it.

However, we recently discontinued the $5/24 hour plan and switched it to a $7/48 hour plan. Both are now discontinued in favor of the $20 annual plan. Unfortunately, too many people were complaining about such a short download window (effectively allowing only 1 version to be obtained) within the subscription period.

In any event, I have place an e-mail with the JED to rectify this.

[jayhowell]

Hey guys,

I'd like to weigh in here on the GPL issue that I've seen tossed about here.

It's completely legal to pay for support and updates for a product under the gpl or the lgpl.  But the source has to be available publically.  And it is completely available at http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/jcalpro/scmsvn/?action=AccessInfo. 

So the service your paying for here is the build, test, and support of the open source product jcal.

I'm a supporter of lots of community projects.  But you really need to be careful with your business model here.  RedHat Linux has the exact same business model.  They have an open source os called fedora that they harden, test and support and call it Red Hat Enterprise linux. 

About a year an a half ago, Oracle decided that they would enter the market.  They took the same fedora project(which is open source) and started branding their own as Unbreakable Linux and selling it. 

One more use case.  About 2 months ago, SpringSource announced that they were going with almost the exact same business model you guys are going with.  They would put out a release, but wouldn't build anything in the community past the 3 month mark in a release.  If you wanted any updates past the 3 month mark, you have to pay for it.  The community rebelled and they took the GPL code out of the repo, ran the build, versioned it themselves and released it.  It was called http://www.freespring.org/ .  This forced springsource to abandon their new model  1 month after adopting it. 

Moral of the story is that you have to keep it cheap enough for someone not to grab the source and put their own jcal component together.  The money  has to be less than the effort of grabbing it.  I think $5, or even $10 is a fair price for the component.  I think the prices that you have on the site are a little over done though.  I'm not sure your $20 a year(lowest subscription I saw) is low enough that someone won't just take the code from svn, build the packages and rebrand it as their own calendar.  As long as you are under the gpl, there's nothing that you can do to stop people or other companies from doing that.  This is the problem when trying to take an opensource component commercial.  When trying to sell the build, test and support of a component, you really need to have a good value add. 

You may want to take your next license commercial, because if there's money in what your doing, someone else will see that and then grab your code and hard work and undersell you.  Like I said I think you prolly need to reduce your price or increase your value add. 

I think it's crappy, but If I were an entrepreneur with no conscience, I'd build it and offer the entire suite of components and modules for $5.  In the end it would probably bring the jcal project to a close(which would not be good), but they'd get their short run profits. 

I'm telling you this, because I want the project around(it's a good component).  I'm not a brilliant man by any respects, so If I'm thinking it, I'm sure someone else with no conscience is thinking it.  Which means its only a matter of time. 
Jay:) 

[V-man]

Thanks for your comments. Perhaps I should clarify:

1. We stopped publishing to the SVN a while back. We were doing this initially because the Joomla environment regarding the GPL was quite raw when we started charging for access and we didn't want to make it worse. However, I realized that having the old version on the SVN was confusing. This has been removed.

2. Initially we had a cheaper download service, $5 for 24 hours access and then $7 for 48 hours access. It took us over a year to realize that this caused too many headaches for end-users (who didn't want to pay a second time) and for our support staff who have to field e-mails and such. Last week we removed these short subscription plans all together and inital reports indicate that all parties are more satisfied.

3. We have been running a commercial GPL business model for over a year now. So far what we are doing seems to pay the bills (we pay a lot in programming costs). People have always been free to fork and distribute. However, what we realized is that the majority of customers want JCal Pro from a trusted source with a good reputation. They want the forum and documentation in the same place. They want to know that they can come back to the same place and get an update. In addition, I think most people underestimate how much time and effort it takes to manage a complicated software project. I suspect people have attempted to fork JCal Pro and just got swamped by the amount of effort. In summary, I think we have continually offered the best overall JCal Pro package for end users.

4. Simply offering a cheaper download service is not enough to sink us. The 'hypothetical' person you describe redistributing JCal also needs traffic, which for most Joomla extensions comes from the Joomla Extension Directory. Importantly, the JED does not list duplicate extensions unless significant modifications have been made. This clause offers a good measure of protection from someone redistributing unmodified copies.

5. Frankly, I think JCal Pro is worth a lot more than $20 for 1 year of access. However, that price-point has not received much resistance and it keeps food on our programmers tables. I feel it is a good compromise, and the popularity of JCal Pro appears to support that.

We will be sending put a survey next week to our newsletter subscribers to try to more accurately gauge end-users thoughts about pricing and the GPL in general. We'll be publishing the results on the blog, so hopefully I'll have some hard data to back up my claims above.

[cavegraffitti]

i agree about paying for this however i think that it was wrong that the day after my subscription ran out there was a major update.

so if i waited 1 more day to subscribe i would have had this updated version.