Originally I was planning to open source my MergableCellListbox subclass this month.
I had always intended to open source it if it went a year with no sales at all, and 2020 was the first such year.
As I previously mentioned, when It was first introduced it, Einhugur StyleGrid did not support merging cells across rows and things like piDog DataView did not exist. It provided a unique capability for it’s day, but there are other options these days that do significantly more now and do it better.
It is based on the Xojo Listbox API from 10 years ago. Over the years I made minor updates/tweaks to keep it working (it was all that I needed to do). While I have not yet moved beyond 2019r1.1 it is still working fine there in a project I just finished…
But it needs updating, both for newer Listbox features as well as API 2. Originally, as long and it continued working, I was not going to do any more work on it. I planned on open sourcing it, and maybe have others help update it to API 2 or add features…
But something has occurred that makes me wonder if maybe I should do that myself and drop the price (I never changed the price I always charged for unencrypted code about what PiDog does now for it’s encrypted DataView).
My current employer is going through a rough patch (right now they are behind in paying us!) and changing direction to survive… the new direction is one where my specific skills are not a great match anymore … So I think there is significant chance my job won’t last much longer.
Being (just) over 65 I know I may not be able to get another professional job, and social security in the US is not a lot, so any extra income would be welcome to augment my retirement savings…
If my job does go away, I will have a lot of time on my hands (I wrote that when I between jobs last time!)
But given the other options available these days, I don’t know if it would be worth the effort. While I could update it to work as it does, and maybe add a minor feature or 2, with my skill set I don’t think could make it more competitive.
If the sales would be almost nil, I would rather open source it to give back to the community, but if it could net even $500+/year I could use that , or at least pay enough to keep my licenses current.
That said, updating it would not be fun, just a lot of slogging through the code. So if it won’t pay I would rather not do it (for my own uses so far it is OK as it is)
I don’t have a good feel for if it might be worth doing… So what do people think? I’m not much of an entrepreneur or sales person!
-Karen