Xojo would be free or very very cheap

Hi,
I’m full time developer and last year I decided to purchase xojo professional license.
After one year of xojo development, I think that xojo should be free or very very cheap.
There are too many bugs and limitation that doesn’t justifies actual prices.
I must spend a lot of my time to bypass listox limitations.
I must spend a lot of my time to write own functions because there aren’t by default (string padding for example).
I must save my jobs each two seconds because the IDE can crash at any time.
IDE 2012r2 works better than IDE 2013r2, so when there is a new update available you don’t know if it is better or not.

Xojo is a very good project but immature.
In my opinion, the best way is make xojo free and open source software to allow to the community improve the project.

Best regards.

Are you sure? It isn’t shown in your profile.

[quote=40344:@Cristian Gintili]Hi,
I’m full time developer and last year I decided to purchase xojo professional license.
After one year of xojo development, I think that xojo should be free or very very cheap.
There are too many bugs and limitation that doesn’t justifies actual prices.
I must spend a lot of my time to bypass listox limitations.
I must spend a lot of my time to write own functions because there aren’t by default (string padding for example).
I must save my jobs each two seconds because the IDE can crash at any time.
IDE 2012r2 works better than IDE 2013r2, so when there is a new update available you don’t know if it is better or not.

Xojo is a very good project but immature.
In my opinion, the best way is make xojo free and open source software to allow to the community improve the project.

Best regards.[/quote]
I agree. They do not have enough engineers to maintain this project. But I do wonder how much money they are earning and if it was possible for them to make a kickstarter project for this.

By “this project”, I mean Xojo.

That is not relevant to the question. Which license he has got should not affect how well Xojo works. Sorry if I sound rude.

I have desktop, console and database server licenses expired on last August.

Exactly.

I don’t if this thread is worth responding to…

I do agree with the kernel of truth that Xojo Corp. needs more engineering resources and that Xojo/REAL can be unreliable, that’s been the case for years - and I’ve used REAL for over 10 years. But…

I think it’s extremely self-absorbed to suggest that it should be free or open-source, just because you have a problem with it. You actually think the people who get paid from the project should just give up and quit, and start giving it away - you essentially are saying they are failures. Maybe I’m getting to be an old curmudgeon, but if that’s the attitude people have today, oh my…

Professional people know better. To use software, try it first. Xojo has a demo. Also, the general opinion (more resources, not bullet-proof) on Xojo/REAL is easy to find, I don’t se why you couldn’t have known about this. Also, Xojo is a new IDE. It’s going to have bugs. You should realize that. Perhaps we want to live in fantasy land and think software is released bug-free. It’s really not.

I’m very, very happy with REAL. Why? Cause I don’t get sucked in. I’m still using 2011r3, there’s no significant bugs. On certain things it doesn’t work as well as I’d like it, but it doesn’t pretend to either. I have a Xojo license, I’ve been using it and am slowly integrating it in. I’m not using it for production, because neither I nor Xojo am ready for it. You have to take time for this stuff.

Try using an older version of Xojo, even REAL. Think of staying with Carbon for a little while longer. Or, try truly understand the product as it exists now and use it in a way it cooperates with you. I don’t believe that Xojo makes crap; I understand the level of frustration, but there ARE things you can do.

Again, I’m not sure this was worth replying too, but cheez…

That’s not how I interpreted the suggestion. People have asked before for a command-line compiler, around which 3rd party IDEs could be wrapped (think Arbed, but with build/check abilities.) Trouble is, the line between the IDE and the framework isn’t well defined, and a lot of magic goes on in the IDE before it passes code to the compiler. I don’t think the Xojo codebase can (easily) be split into a closed-source and open-source parts.

If @Geoff Perlman were to grant me any three Xojo wishes, I’d ask for a naked command-line compiler as a the paid product, the IDE as closed-source-but-free (like now), and large swathes of the framework as permissive open-source (maybe with mandatory rights-assignment to Xojo for legal reasons.) They could even sell commit access to the master branch of the framework in the Pro package; I’d buy it.

(Just my opinion) Perhaps I’ve been at the REAL/Xojo game too long, but I think it’s obvious that the whole thing is a complete product - IDE + Compiler, and nothing has ever been shown it’s ever thought of as separate components.

Again, the whole thing is a for-profit enterprise, and something would really have to turn bottom’s up to change that. Xojo doesn’t really have much competition, if any. The only place to truly turn for a cross platform product that competes truly with Xojo is XCode and Visual Studio, and both demand much more work and education.

You really have TWO choices… You purchase a subscription license… or you don’t… Not sure how much simpler it can be.

You either use the product, provide CONSTRUCTIVE feedback, and support the decisions of Xojo Management, or you don’t.

Obviously there are enough us who DO, as they are still in business… and while I’m sure they would love to keep the rest of you as customers… that is YOUR decision to make not theirs.

Should it come to pass that those of us willing to work within the construct provider becomes too small a number, then the customer base will have spoken and Xojo will pass away… But open-source? don’t hold your breath…

I reach each and every “please open source XX” proposal with anticipation that one might actually make any sense. Kinda like when driving by an open field, I give it a quick glance so I don’t miss any unicorns.

Well if your primary reason for free/open source is that the product is not worth the price then your argument already fails. Let’s imagine that it were open source. The build process for all three platforms with all dependencies, pre-compiling the libraries, packing the documentation, etc. would be so complicated that you would end up paying Xojo just to build a release for you.

So where does that leave you? That leaves you with the assumption that if it were open source the community is large enough and technical enough to understand the ins/outs of a cross platform framework. You also assume that they have the time to contribute to the community for free so that all can benefit.

I think the reason Xojo has little competition is because what they are trying to do is HARD. Look at Xamarin if you want an example. Mono is cross platform and awesome and uses native toolkits. However they don’t precompile the libraries so you can build Mac on Windows, nor have they abstracted away the native UI toolkits. So you end up using Cocoa for Mono and Win32 for Mono separately in two entirely different projects with multiple build steps to ultimately arrive at the same destination.

That manual tedious process is worth something no?

So if we assume that the model they have now is actually correct then we are just left with needing more engineers. Of course as outsiders looking in we don’t know how many people actually work on the product. They could spin up multiple contractors or maybe they only have the few employees that are here on the forums. It’s been proven and books written about it that adding more chefs to the kitchen doesn’t necessarily make a better dish. A lot of times it can make a worse one because theres different ideas, egos, time/geographical differences, etc.

So alas I think this argument is stale. You must only decide if you need the power of cross platform and convenience Xojo provides.

My personal opinion is the price is a little too high and should probably come down slightly, but overall, I think that this is a great product. Does it have bugs? Absolutely, but are they manageable? Yes, I just think that given the current level of bugs, the prices should probably be lowered by about 30% or so.

I would rather them raise the price to be able to throw more resources at the current product than have it be free and rely on some unpaid person to fix something.

No development tool is perfect, there are some issues that need attention but what Xojo has accomplished is impressive. It might not work for some, but others are making a living with it and writing applications that are used in businesses every day.

I thought you were going to say, to see if it’s muddy, so I have some fun the SUV…

My own feelings on this is that Xojo’s strength is x-plat compiling. There are other tools out there that do similar, but none as feature rich as Xojo, and Xojo’s primary competitor don’t even compile. Xojo is the BEST x-plat dev tool, I’ve found.

I think you’re a little hasty is asking Xojo to be free or open source, how would Xojo make money? Not to mention, Open Source and FREE products have bugs just like commercial apps. Xcode has it’s fair share of bugs.

As for adding your own functionality, like padding a string or working around limitations of supplied controls, that goes without saying, you’ll get these in any language, or in fact in OS level toolboxes.

Recently I discovered a bug with an OS (who’s name we don’t mention), whereby on certain graphics, images with a byte order that matched the display byte order and bit depth, were being munged into solid black, yet on other version of the OS, this actually gave a speed boost! It took two days to narrow this down. I reported the bug, but it wasn’t fixed by the time I shipped the app, so I had to ship it using the slower mechanism whereby the byte order needs to be swapped to display the graphics (at least that’s done by the OS).

I guess what I’m trying to say is that you will find limitations and bugs in apps, no matter if they’re open source, FREE or commercial. Xojo do listen to constructive feedback and do adapt accordingly.

Xojo do release regular updates, where they attempt to fix as many bugs as possible.

At least it’s not the gaming trend, where you buy a game, but the developers are so cheap, you need to buy credits so that you can complete a level, to then have to buy more credits to complete the next (and no I’m not that sucky at games).

[quote=40344:@Cristian Gintili]I must spend a lot of my time to bypass listox limitations.
I must spend a lot of my time to write own functions because there aren’t by default (string padding for example).[/quote]

You mean you actually have to code ?

Shame on Xojo…They should do it for you. :wink:

I have gotten more out of using Xojo than I’ll ever put into it, so from my perspective, it’s quite inexpensive. However, when you do find that easy-to-use, cross-platform development environment that let’s us compile standalone, native applications, and is bug-free, I hope you will share it with us. I’ll make the switch too.

My sentiments exactly. We have been using the product since RB 2.x, and while we certainly get frustrated from time to time with its behaviors or unfixed bugs, we, too, have gotten a lot of bang for our license costs and the time we’ve put in to learning to use it.

If the cost and/or functionality of Xojo are not to one’s liking, the obvious solution is not to buy a license.

[quote=40395:@Michel Bujardet]You mean you actually have to code ?

Shame on Xojo…They should do it for you. ;)[/quote]
Maybe we need to have a kickstarter to fund the ESP module ?