I've been thinking a lot about what I really want to do with POP Forums
when I finally finish v8. The truth is, because it's actually the
center piece of the various sites I run, it holds up everything else
for me, and that's kind of been torturing me for the better part of two
years now.
So to think about what I'll do with it, I have to
think about where it has been. It started as a simple app for Guide to
The Point (which is now PointBuzz).
It was old ASP, it was simple, it was fast, and it was far easier to
manage than UBB. It even ran on an Access database. It was absolutely
full of security holes. But wow, it was so simple, basically three or
four ASP's.
But I made it a self-contained app, and I sold it for
about $200 a license. I made a couple grand that year (2000). ASP
seriously lacked community back then, and it never did draw people in
the way that ASP.NET has.
In 2002, I ported it to ASP.NET. That
was a lateral move, because it lacked any object-oriented coding. What
an embarrassing mess that was. It wasn't until a year later that I
started from scratch and wrote what largely remains today. It's not
ideal, but it works fairly well. In late 2003, I removed the licensing
and started giving it away, because I just didn't feel there was a
market for selling it.
I did a point release of sorts in late
2004, but there was no significant upgrade. It has essentially been the
same for three years. Why? I think in part it's because there's no
financial incentive to keep doing it. For my own use, it doesn't
perform horribly enough to stress about it, so there's little internal
incentive.
Money generally doesn't motivate me, as I really only
need enough to eat, pay the mortgage, travel now and then and buy
electronic toys. I've had the potential to be a six-figure earner for a
long time now, but I choose not to do it, opting instead to live a
comfortable lifestyle and spend more time doing my own thing.
That
pretty much leaves just one incentive to finish the revision, and
that's to enhance my own sites and start over from a far more
manageable code base. Then what? The way I see it, there are several
options...
- Keep it all to myself. (Insert evil laugh
here.) OK, I don't think that's really a choice I would take, but for
the sake of completeness, there it is.
- Continue to give it
away. To be honest with you, I'm not so sure I want to do that anymore.
I hate that Web culture doesn't see enough value in much of anything
anymore to pay for it. Yet, people buy bling and ringtones for their
wireless phones at ridiculous cost. By giving it away, am I saying I
don't think there's any value in the product?
- License it
inexpensively, with source code, on the honor system. There's a lot of
appeal here because even if someone doesn't want to pay for it, they
can get something out of it by looking at my code and hopefully
learning something from it (even if it's how not to do things). You can
download, play, and if you see that value I hope is there, you can pay
for it.
- License it, and lock it down. That means no code to
see, and it won't work without a key. If I did go this route, I suspect
the return on investment would be low since this is very much a
commodity item many aren't willing to pay for. See: phpBB (which is
crap, by the way). I think I'd at least have to do a "lite" version the
way I did in the old ASP days, as that sold a lot of licenses.
The
biggest point in all of that is actually the last one, about it not
being something a lot of people see value in. Sometimes value isn't
defined in terms of quality, but relative to what else is out there and
at what cost.
This is what I've been thinking about.