Hmmmm. A forum ostensibly targeting people who want to be in the business of making money with software up in arms about a company trying to make money with software. Am I allowed to call this ironic?
The thing is though, .NET Reflector used to be Freeware, written by a guy in his spare time (incidentally, who is now an architect on Blend). He sold it to Red Gate, who keep trying to monetize it in increasingly intrusive ways (forcing updates, popping dialogs, etc).
While I understand Red Gate's need to make a return on their work, they've gone about it in an unpopular way, trying to force people to pay for an extra feature (debugging through code w/o source) that many people simply don't want.
FYI, Lutz was on Blend (then called Sparkle) since he first produced reflector, at least as far as I remember. He was the brave soul tasked with integrating some components my team was producing for them, back in the deep, dark, early-aughts.
> trying to force people to pay for an extra feature (debugging through code w/o source) that many people simply don't want
Isn't that the way software businesses work? They build features that they hope will convince people to pay for upgrades or renewals. If people don't want the new feature, the company won't make any money.
It doesn't seem to be an evil or malicious route to me; it's just charging for something which was free before because they can no longer maintain it that way.
In previous versions, I was stuck by how terribly Red Gate implemented the "time bomb". You run Reflector one day and an innocuous dialog comes up saying "A new version of Reflector is available. Do you want to upgrade? OK/Cancel" And if you click "Cancel", it exits, while silently deleting the executable from the disk.
I can't think of another program that violates user expectation quite so thoroughly.
