Just a thought...

[stipus]

I also want to add that it's very hard to work on someone else code... this means escrowing the code to HS won't make a big difference in support.

I tried to create a new .Net plugin from the SMS plugin source code, and after studying the code for several hours, I really thought it would be a lot easier to restart from scratch.

Then why would I spend many days on creating a new .Net SMS plugin when there is a free plugin, even if it's not supported anymore... that's again asking for less than one plugin sale per month...

[nightwalker]

I agree with a lot of what has been said here. The point to my earlier post is not that there are 3rd party plug-ins, it's that they are managed by HST, through the updater for installs and through HST for purchase. To me that gives HST at least some responsibility for what they are re-selling. If a plug-in is not supported and the author is no longer active then HST should not be selling that plug-in.

I'm quite sure that writing a plug-in is not easy and while we all like free stuff I'm not asking for free. What i do ask for from any software i buy is value. Does it solve a problem for me, is it worth to me what the author needs to receive in compensation, and a host of other questions we all ask ourselves every time we buy anything.

I trial plug-ins when they purport to do the task that I'm interested in. I buy them when they prove they in fact do what they say they do, that's just the way of the world for us all i think. At that point I don't care if it's a 3rd party, a HST, or even one of the (gasp) banned plug-in authors. If it works, it works and i don't care if it's in the updater or if i download it from another site and pay the author directly, my interest is in adding a function or solving a problem.

Thankfully MS doesn't try to re-sell all the software that works or doesn't with it's operating systems. On a smaller scale though that's what HST is doing with their 3rd party plug-in policies.

If you spend anytime here reading posts you know what plug-ins work and which are problematic. I've learned to stay away from those plug-ins that get no answers or seem to have chronic problems that never seem to get fixed. These include both 3rd party and HST own plug-ins.

My only point here is that if HST is going to re-sell a 3rd party plug-in and have it installed through the updater then it is their responsibility to see that the plug-in is supported. If they are selling old, unsupported, non working plug-ins, shame on them. It's not the missing author who takes the brunt of things, they're not here to hear it.

[TechnoCat]

As a plugin author for the last few years, I think I can add a few words to this interesting post. <snip> A complex plugin sometimes requires months of work to code, and countless hours to support. <snip> - Many different users with many different configurations... it never works 100% for everyone.<snip> Many here are asking for high quality and supported plugins... but why would you get this for free?

That's been an interesting revelation to me too. PowerTrigger seems to have worked well for almost everybody, but a few edge conditions guaranteed to be limited to less than 1% of the users can take nearly as much time as developing the rest of the code. Plus the difference between implementing what I wanted for me and implementing it for everyone else is about a factor of three, due to...

• Having to document well
• More error handling
• Needing to anticipate odd inputs that I personally know better than to do
• Support
• The Installer
• Submitting the dratted package. (There seem to be a lot of ways in which it can be rejected, and it doesn't go up promptly always anyhow; there's a PowerTrigger update queued for more than a business day as we speak!)
• Fixing the edge conditions - comma radixes in Europe, running from the Desktop, someone graphing ten devices when I only have three that I even log, etc.

There's no financial incentive for me to do this, and strong disincentive in terms of time and how users feel if the free plug-in doesn't do exactly what they want.
In fact, just a few messages ago in this very thread, a user who has never contributed any plug-ins or wiki documentation called PowerTrigger "not mature". It's friggin' free and it works, but that user still felt a need to bash it. It's that sense of entitlement that hinders the community spirit here.

All that said, I can understand users being annoyed paying $30 for something that then isn't supported. I personally believe far more of the plug-ins should be free. But they should also make it much easier to submit them to the Updater.