Why is Sauce Reader for sale and not sold?
I have posted before about Sauce Reader. It used to be my preferred feed reader and blogging tool (then I got slack about reading blogs and started using IE7 for reading and the .Text Web interface for posting). Sauce Reader is a nice 2-in-1 piece of software with a well-designed interface and compelling features. A while ago Synop, maker of Sauce Reader, closed for business and put the Sauce Reader brand and source code up for sale. As of this posting (Oct 20, 2005) it still has not sold.
Frankly I'm a little surprised that no one has snatched it up for $10K, which was the starting bid when it was posted for sale on eBay. I've seen posts that claim the price is much too high in a software category where people expect things for free (or at least very, very cheap). But Sauce Reader does a boatload of good stuff and has a number of inspired features. If you were to hire a high quality professional developer and pay $75K per year, you would get about 7 weeks of effort for $10,000 (assuming no other costs, which is absurd). I don't think many developers could build, stabilize, and fully test a Sauce Reader clone in 7 weeks (certainly not C# AND Delphi versions).
Of course I will concede that blogging software is generally a labour of love. There are not that many people out there hiring developers to write blogging tools for the desktop (as far as I know). But Sauce Reader also had some degree of brand recognition and good will. I guess I'm just a little surprised that nobody has looked at the Sauce Reader offering of code + brand and had a lightbulb moment about how to cash in on it.
That being said, I'm not ponying up $10K for it. But my plate is full running a consulting company and pursuing Project Elm, The Vortex Project, and a Web-based church software suite that does not have a name or codename - we just called it "the church software" (we're open to suggestions).