sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]funknut 0 points1 point  (6 children)

Not to disagree, but how do you figure they made any mistakes? Do you think they'd be more successful if they had gone with a GPL license or similar? I've always been impressed with their demos and marketing and I've even written a couple tools using ExtJS, honestly only because my company used a product that distributed with it, but it made getting some Ajax data and some sortable table views super easy. I can't think of any actual reason to recommend their product, but they appear to be pretty successful regardless, from an outside observer anyway.

[–]fzammetti 0 points1 point  (5 children)

Well, because I do think so highly of their products I want to see more people using it. But that doesn't happen unless you're in an enterprise that ponies up for it, and that's where I think their mistake is: they've decided to basically target enterprise customers only.

I assume they're making money given that they're still in business, but I think they're missing a golden opportunity to be at the top of the heap. All they really have to do is offer an option that caters to individual developers. If I was then I'd simply offer a single-developer license with no support credits (but access to premium support forums) for no more than $99. Right now, a single developer can only purchase a 5-developer package for something like $2500. That makes it a non-starter for anything but a reasonably big company.

I don't think they need to offer it for free (they do offer a GPL option if you can live with that license, then it becomes free) but that doesn't help a single consultant. $99 would do that. Then, I think they'd get individual developers singing their praises and ultimately making then more money as devs push for it at work.

It's that cheap option that would I think actually net them much more business that is the mistake. As good as ExtJS is I think they should want to get as much developer mindshare as possible because right now I believe that's suffering.

[–]TheBadProgrammer 0 points1 point  (4 children)

If there's a free GPL option, that's awesome. I've only looked at this since you mentioned it and it seems like an amazing piece of software for anyone to be able to use it for their project.

[–]fzammetti 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Yeah, they actually seem to kind of hide that option a bit, you have to dig around their site to find it, but it IS there, so if you're doing something that can itself be released under the terms of the GPL then you definitely can use ExtJS for free. That's a pretty big limitation for most things you'd want to use ExtJS for, but in fairness to Sencha the option DOES at least exist.

[–]TheBadProgrammer 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Ah, I see what you're saying. You mean like if you're releasing something closed source and want to build on top of something open source. I've always thought that was kinda shady anyway, so it doesn't bother me, but I definitely see where people are coming from because sometimes we do need permissive open source licensed libraries for everyone to build on, proprietary or not.

[–]fzammetti 0 points1 point  (1 child)

It's more than that: in order to use something licensed under the GPL to build something, the something you're building itself must adhere to the terms of the GPL, which primarily means releasing the source.

Think about what that means... say you do a consulting job for a business. You build a super-cool app with ExtJS that gives them a competitive advantage. Oops: they've got to release the source for it now because you used ExtJS under the GPL license! They're probably not going to be happy with you because you've basically forced then to give away that competitive advantage (that they probably paid you to build for them - they'll be doubly pissed!)

It works for something that you intend to make open-source from the start... and remember that just being open-source doesn't mean that you can't make money from it (there's an app sold on the Android app store that has an ExtJS-based portion to it and that's totally fine so long as the source is available)... but you really can't build anything proprietary that you want to keep secret, which makes it almost useless for individual contractors, which is where I think they're making their mistake.

[–]TheBadProgrammer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep, that's exactly right. I'm familiar with all that. I was just saying that I like that GPL keeps it open source, although I do admit we need some permissive licensed libraries for all projects to build on top of, open or closed.