Warning: Post contains gratuitous ranting. Viewer discretion advised.

I haven't had a good rant in a few days, and I just dealt with something that really burns me up, so I'm gonna talk about it.

I feel violated. As a developer, I feel like I was just taken advantage of on the first date. As a component vendor, I am disgusted. I shouldn't have to sell vital body parts to enable my apps to do cool things. I can just see it now "Get our entire product line for a kidney and your firstborn child.... we'll throw in free shipping!!!"

While most of the schmucks out there picket in front of the B0rg Collective touting the free love-ish 70's idea of open source, and how it will cure cancer, break the sublight barrier, and give your woman firmer breasts, I'm going to work for a cause that is worthwhile and, God forbid, ATTAINABLE: leading a coalition of the willing in an all out war against the raping and pillaging of our nation's poor defenseless programmers. Yes, you have great software that is reasonably priced. Capitalism can still work in software. Just think of it, if software was not so expensive, the Open Source Movement would have nothing to complain about . < /robert:rant >

I'm feeling much better now, thank you. Now you may be wondering what made me break out the silver tongue of death. I point the finger of shame squarely at the wonderful company called Infragistics. Their .NET TreeView component is $495, source code for $695, and priority support for $995. Ugh, it gets me so mad just thinking about it. But I'm done ranting, so I will keep it civil. This is absolutely ridiculous. You've got to be out your frickin gourd to spend that kind of money on one lousy component.

Infragistics isn't even the worst one. The biggest software crime against humanity comes from SoftArtisans, who sells their ExcelWriter server product for a brain-melting $4000. My car didn't even cost me $4000. I think I'm starting to rant again, so I'm going to leave it at that for the evening, and go back to looking at some of the nifty FREE treeview components that some of you showed me. I can guarantee you one thing: this is not the last you've heard from me on this topic.

3 Comments

  • I gotta jump a little to Infragistics defense here - the 500 bucks gets you the entire suite of COM, .NET *and* ASP.NET stuff. There's some really nice looking stuff there. I've only had experience with their COM toolbars and Splitters, and I can tell you they were well worth the money we spent on them.





    If you just want the tree itself, it can be purchased for a mere 400 bucks. Now *that* is a rip-off. I'm guessing designed to get people to upsize to the whole net advantage suite, it should be more like 50 bucks.

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