I've been giving thought as to how I'm going to charge and license Data Tree when it's ready.
The charge and what you'll get for it
I've come to the decision that £30 for a licence would be a fair and reasonable charge for the initial release and this will also include a couple of incremental releases. A friend of mine suggested that I publish a roadmap, so I'd say that, based upon the feedback so far, I would add in-node checkboxes, a reasonably customisable skin and cursor key navigation as major improvements as part of this deal. I'm sure I'll add some nice little tweaks and other improvements along the way but after that, whatever I'll add will be big, require a lot of work and therefore justify an upgrade charge.
Licence fee basis
The licence basis will be on a per user basis. So, if you're running a development company, you'll need a license for each developer that will work with Data Tree. If you're on your Todd, just one will do. There won't be any further charges or royalties to pay for using it in your own commercial products but, as stated in the licence agreement, you will be prohibited from doing certain things with it such as wrapping it up into another commercial library.
Next beta
The next beta release will be getting very, very close to the finished thing. When I've released this beta, you'll no longer need to log into the site to get it. I'm going to pop it onto the downloads page for anyone to download. As with the other recent downloads, it will carry an expiry date of 31 March 2010 and a new nag screen that'll pop up every now and then.
Nag screens and the buying process
The nag screen is intended for the final release but the expiry date will obviously be removed. To get rid of the nag screen, you'll need to buy a licensed download of the software. To do this, you'll create an account with the site, pay me some money and once I've activated it, the nag-free download will be made available to you when you next log in.
Support?
And then there's the support to think about. Well, my licence agreement does state that there is to be no expectation of support but I am going to be introducing a forum to the site to answer questions. It will also double up as an FAQ. I'm afraid that I really cannot fit in any active support into my life and my boss would kill me (possibly several times over) if I did anything during work hours!
So there we go! Normal face resumes.