That’s right. All software made by Radical Breeze is becoming free and is going to be supported 100% by donations.
This includes:
RadicalCodex : The eBook and digital comic book reader. And organizer. And eBook device sync-er.
Radical Comic Designer : The webcomic and comic book designing software that lets you quickly add panels, bubles and captions to any images.
DoThisNow : Which lets you run configurable (and pre-set) actions on a given schedule or via global menu item.
The Linux versions of all these applications have already been updated and made free.
Windows and Mac versions of all applications will be updated over the course of the week to be made free as well.
If you like these applications, and would like to help development continue, you can donate here. One time and recurring donations are available. Every little bit helps.
==UPDATE==
Many people are asking if these applications will be released as open source as well.
The short answer?
Yes.
Long answer:
Yes, but it will be a staggered release. There are a few hurdles (read: “extra work bryan has to do that he just doesn’t have time for”) in order to be able to release the source to these applications. But that is the ultimate plan. I also am not 100% certain what license they will be released under as yet. I am leaning towards GPL v2 currently.
May 27th, 2009 - 1:13 am
By free do you also mean open-source? I would rather my money go to supporting code openly available to the community library than to code that may have a dead end in the future. My challenge was that I think people would pay for FLOSS if they knew how. I.e. developers made it easy to donate (and if it were organized and convenient http://www.helposss.org) even better.
That said, I will probably support your donation scheme anyway.
May 27th, 2009 - 1:14 am
Great news Bryan, really pleased you are making blog posts about the experiment also.
Now.. Any chance of the products being released as source tarballs, under a free licence
Perhaps asking too much.
Thanks.
May 27th, 2009 - 1:24 am
Very cool. These every going to become open source as well?
May 27th, 2009 - 1:53 am
Howdy Bryan,
Why the change in direction?
I am sure you will make some announcement somewhere and I am really keen to see the whole software development discussion on proprietary apps/code/development as opposed to that done in the open and open source code/apps/developement cycle.
Cheers,
Michael
May 27th, 2009 - 4:16 am
One thing: Make the donate link bigger, more visible, slightly different color or something like that. Right now, I had to look for it. And I looked for it only because I knew it was there.
May 27th, 2009 - 1:43 pm
Well, how about that ?
I was just reading your previous article about your 3 1/2 month experiment and was thinking that it was just a lame attempt at marketing (3 1/2 months can be hardly consider as a meaningful time lapse for a commercial software project IMHO).
Now you’ve made this pledge and you’ve instantaneously earned my donation (even though I don’t think I’ll be using your software any time soon). Good luck !
May 27th, 2009 - 2:24 pm
Care to explain exactly why you decided to do this? Was the main motivation that you simply wanted to see the software getting a wide usage? And selling the software just was a dead end?
Do you see yourself ever trying to do commercial software products on linux again?
May 27th, 2009 - 3:01 pm
I imagine that by doing this, you will be able to find out what percentage of people download the software when it’s free. This will give an idea as to how many people who would actually use this kind of software would also pay for it v. those who wouldn’t.
May 27th, 2009 - 5:38 pm
None of these applications was really that commercial anyway, so it won’t leave a big impact or can hardly be used in any study related to “Can software on Linux be non-open source”.
I Bryan had decided to create a accounting-software (for US only that is, since we have different rules for accounting around the world), or a bookkeeping-program or for an invoices-program (which would be ideal for developers!) the story might have been different.
I would very much like to see that it is possible to develop commercial software for Linux where the software house - or the developer - gets a shit load of bashing just because they (or he) creates software that is not a) Open source, b) free or c) combination of a) and b).
If I was Bryan I would:
Do a market survey (this is probably not the right term, but English is not my mother tongue) and see what type of software is needed for Linux (and not just the typical answer here: Photoshop, dreamweaver, iTunes - because he can’t develop them anyway) and develop software based on the answers he gets from the market survey.
Keep up Bryan, but start developing software that there _really_ is a need for on a bigger scale.
May 30th, 2009 - 6:30 pm
[...] days ago that Radical Breeze applications (including RadicalCodex and Radical Comic Designer) were being released for free, I figured I’ll lay out my overall plan here of how, exactly, this is going to [...]