Is it the right place to sell tools, components, code on this blog ?

I am surely going to be flame for this post, but I like free speech ;-)

I am not sure that .Net blogs is a good place to sell your tools, guys. Talking about code, sharing the code, this is for me the purpose of this space.

Eventually like I often do, mentioning a new component from some bloke, yes it's making the community better and bigger.

I am committed to give as much as possible my energy to contribute to this weblog but I don't like to see the blog being a commercial space for our own products.

This webspace should be (IMHO) more open source oriented.

Of course it doesn't mean that the developers writing components don't have any talent, on the contrary.

But other tahn promoting once their product, they should open their own commercial site to operate their business.

 

12 Comments

  • You're right about selling the stuff. But I think it is a great idea to share tools and components for free even if the source code is not included. And I feel it's fair to ask for a donation. I am really happy that there are people who share great tools: Sharpreader, Reflector, Snippet Compiler, ...

  • Stefan it's exactly what I said in my post ;-)

    I post many times links to some great components, but I am not sure I will use this blog to sell my own stuff. I think it's a lazy and unclean way to do business

  • As you can see Stefan I post a link to your tool ;-)

    This is for me the way a community shuld work,linking each other on the other development.

  • :-)

    There was one reason I wrote my tool:

    I was frustrated with the tools from Microsoft and realised that the OCX can do much more than the snap-in. There were specific feature requests at my workplace.

    There was one reason I published my tool:

    I am satisfied with it's functionality, but other people have other ideas. So feedback helps me to improve the application and I learn while implementing some ideas.

    There is one reason why I do not release the source code:

    I think, some things are somehow hacky implemented and fear that if someone studies my code, he will not use my tool anymore ;-)

  • Stefan yes I agree. Sharing doesn't mean necessarily to give your code, but it's a better practice to have somebody else 'pushing' your tool. Unless you want to open a website to sell it.

  • So we share the same opinion. Can you point me to some guys who commercialized their blog to sell their products? I am just curious.



    Besides you really put much energy to your blog. Alone your archive statistics are impressive - average of 100 posts per month!!! Oh, in september you were probably on vacation ;-)

  • Well, dunno if you refer to me, but I used to blog once or twice about my tool. If someone gets annoyed by blogs about a given product, don't read the blog.



    Personally I really get tired about reading the zillionth blog about how great the PDC is/was, how the installation of an alpha version of longhorn went and the gazillionth post about VB developers who feel offended because some MS employee declared them 'stupid'.



    However, it's everyone's right to blog what he/she likes to blog about, so you won't see me blogging about the quality of blogs of others. Apparently every blogger and his brother felt the urge to blog about an OS that is 3 years away... so let them. When a person works very hard on a tool and wants to blog about that tool, let him/her.

  • Frans this is not the point ! I agree you can talk about everything you want on a blog, but I think it's not fair to use a free space to make business ;-)



    And no you were not targeted. Indeed my post has nothing personal. I just don't like posts like 'Buy my tool, this is the best of all the tools, come on I 'll give you a free box of soap if you buy it, I swear I will do , go on, go on...' ;-)

  • I agree with Paschal - this is one of the numerous reasons I host my own blog instead of putting it on Weblogs.asp.net. Is there a flag you can set when posting to your own blog to prevent it from showing on the main page - this would be very useful in keeping some swarf off the main page. Frans, saying don't read the blog is easy enough...but if it appears in the aggregated list I have no choice. This is a pretty old debate and goes back to the days of BBS where an entire board could get trashed by a few self-serving individuals (self promoting component vendors and recruitment people being the worst offenders).

  • There are some people who blog only about their tool, a given code generator creator for example ;). Nothing wrong with that, though. It's his choice. After all: who will contact him because of his insightful views on a lot of .NET related aspects? Not a lot. SImply because he hasn't expressed any :D



    That it ends up in the main feed is the whole purpose of blogging about a given subject: to get as much attention as possible. :) I don't see anything wrong with that either though. When I open sharpreader in the morning there are about 35-40 new postings on weblogs.asp.net. I read 3 to 4 of them max. The rest is boring stuff about topics already mentioned on other blogs or totally irrelevant. (my opinion). Others will think differently, and that's perfectly ok, you can't please everybody :)

  • Robert you see I am not a bad man, because I can do the same than you, deleting the comments I dislike but no !

    (Unless you are writing with a rude language ;-))

    And for the code, yes I write code, and yes I am not the best programmer of the world, but just a guy who like to blog about .Net and other technologies.

    And open source is also possible with .Net, see GotDotNet for example.

  • I do not blog here so my opinion may not matter, but here it is anyway: Scott W is the only person who can "decide" what goes here. Mr. A doesn't get to decide what is off-topic, Mr. B doesn't get to decide how many posts per day a person should do, Mr. C doesn't get to decide if someone is allowed to post images of butterflies they've photographed. Scott W can entertain your suggestions, as can other members, but only Scott has the right to lay rules.

    If YOU are the person to decide the rules of the place, then you will need to be a little more clear. Can someone who works for MS on Windows mention Longhorn? If so, then you're going to need to make up some more rules and more well-defined rules. But, like I said, I do not think that is your decision to make.

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