Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Sage Developers Licence - Is it worth it?

I sometimes wonder how many developers actually make any money out of having a Line 50 Developers licence.

Had another call today from a user who has an SDO v10 application. They've just upgraded to v12 and it has not surprisinly stopped working. The developer flatly refuses to pay for a V12 licence, presumably because they can't make any money out of it and undoubtedly the user doesn't want to pay a realistic amount. Were not about to do the job for 3/6 either. We have had this experience a number of times so it can't be uncommon.

The problem is that Line 50 is relatively cheap so the users perception of everything else is that it should be similarly cheap. Strangely, I don't think the answer is to make the SDO licence cheaper as this would just mean there is absolutely no money in developing for Sage Line 50 at all. Perhaps developers should try charging a sensible rate for their work instead of following the rest of the computer industry down the plughole of ever decreasing prices.

Speaking as someone with other 30 years in the industry and experience of just about every role, development is a lot more time consuming than installing a server and requires a far more expensive set of tools ; Sage Licence, Sage Additions advertising, Programming languag, MSDN subscription etc but I can still make far more money slapping in a server than spending a lot more time developing a robust piece of code.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Sage Line 50 Version 13 (sorry 2007)

We got our copies of the new Sage Line 50 and the developers toolkit today.

Initial impressions are that Line 50 looks pretty much the same as version 12 in terms of the interface.

We will be starting to test the new sdo with our products in the next few days so watch this space.