There were confident they could maintain a free version; they tried (really hard, I might add) to make the freemium business model work with Reflector, but in the end, they just couldn't.
BTW, have you ever considered that if Red Gate didn't buy Reflector from Lutz, he might've stopped maintaining it for free on into perpetuity? That at some point, he might've realized that he was giving away something that people found extraordinarily useful, and might have tried to monetize it himself? What if, 2-3 years ago, we were instead reading a blog post from Lutz saying that he was going to start charging $200/license for Reflector, effective immediately? Would you still be so morally outraged? If not, why?
Yes. Free and unmaintained from Lutz would have been better. There are A LOT of free plugins for Reflector out. Everyone is thinking about Reflector itself and ignore the work of plugin authors who extended Reflector because it WAS a GREAT FREE TOOL for the .net community. Without a free version all those plugins are useless. I see no problem if Lutz tried to monetize. I would have bought a license first and foremost as "thank you".
Also, how the fuck they tried "really hard" to maintain freemium ? Since they brought Reflector they basically added the VS debugger integration FOR MONEY. How is that trying really hard for the free version ?!
Just to be understood correctly. I don't have anything against RedGate. In fact , as i said, they made some great tools. But grabbing one of the best FREE tools in the .net world and trying to monetize (after pledging for a free version) just makes them seem assholes.
BTW, have you ever considered that if Red Gate didn't buy Reflector from Lutz, he might've stopped maintaining it for free on into perpetuity? That at some point, he might've realized that he was giving away something that people found extraordinarily useful, and might have tried to monetize it himself? What if, 2-3 years ago, we were instead reading a blog post from Lutz saying that he was going to start charging $200/license for Reflector, effective immediately? Would you still be so morally outraged? If not, why?