mtraum wrote:You make a good point. But, if it weren't for the open source project Eclipse, this product would not exist.
Why do you think that? We have been in the GUI building business for more than a dozen years (first in the Smalltalk world). Eclipse is an excellent platform, but not the only possible choice.
I should also point out that we have been involved with Eclipse now for more than five years (since long before it was announced by IBM or even named for that matter). Some of the very first demo apps that IBM had to show people back in 2001 were created by us. If it weren't for the very early adoption of Eclipse by vendors like us, Eclipse itself might not have ever existed.
We have also contributed an extraordinary amount of resources (relative to the size of our company) to the Eclipse community. We were early members of the Eclipse board and currently chair the Eclipse Marketing and PR committees. We also run two Eclipse projects: KOI and Pollinate.
We have also given away tens of thousands of copies of free product to the Java community - first with our VA Assist product for VA Java and now with free versions of our Designer products.
mtraum wrote:While it it my understanding that this company is making contributions to VE, I think it would be a greater gesture of appreciation to make it availble for free for open source development.
We do make the full product available for free on a case by case basis and have given away many copies to support various open source projects (primarily Eclipse.org projects). We have also given the product away to any Eclipse committer that has asked us for it.
We don't plan to make the full pro version freely available (except on a case by case basis) as that would be far too easy to abuse (we see far too much license abuse as it is).