Here is the scenario that warrants a cheaper price on licensing NON gui version of FB.. kinda like the Standalone Build tool that is provided with the InstallShield product
1) Team size is 10 people
- 1 Product Team Manager; still codes 50% of the time
- Team manager doesn't know anything about automating build systems; has no experience with it
- 3 Senior Devs
- one senior dev (me) is tasked with designing an automated build system for all our software products
- 6 Intermediate Devs
- mostly limited to feature by feature development tasks
- they Don't know anything about the complexity of buildin all the components that make the product whole
I would like to design an automated build system that uses FinalBuilder for ALL our software automation build processes
so that EVERY team member can BUILD using final builder scripts on the command line.. but NOT every dev needs the FULL FB product installed..
but I don't want to be forced to buy 10 full licenses of the GUI tool for every dev.
- Only one or two people NEED know how to use the FB Project Design tool
- the majority only need to build the software using a "stand alone" style system.
InstallSheild Professional has a good example of this concept
a single licence of IS Professional/Enterprise GUI tool.. includes a Fully functional "Stand Alone" tool that can be deployed onto many other build machines @ NO Extra licensing costs
VMware also do this, although perhaps you don't need to go quite so far as a free tool :) We have two copies of VMware pro for the people that actually need to edit VM configuaration and play around, and everyone else uses the free VMware player.
We have looked at this on numerous occasions, and it always comes down to risk.
If we compare to Installshield, we would need to up our pricing by 4 times at least to compare (last time I looked installshield cost at least 4 times FB pro). Considering the competition we have with free and open source software that would be difficult for people to accept. If we compare to VMWare, well we don’t have any other multi $K products to subsidise our ‘free’ version.
So while making a free runtime available might be popular with existing customers, it also might send us broke. We do make repeat sales to existing customers all the time and it does account for a significant proportion of our sales. For myself as the owner of the business and employer of our staff that’s just too big a gamble to take at this time.
I would like something like this as well, but what would meet our needs is simply a Final Builder “Builder” that does not allow modifications to a build, but simply runs a build created by a fully-licensed version.
This way, I could create the build scripts that would handle any builds the developers need to do on their machines (mostly for updating the development environment with new components, etc.), and they would simply run the build when needed. . .
It would still be worth paying for this type of version because of the time it would save us, I would just rather not pay the full price for this functionality.
This is a strange conversation. Surely from a functionality point of view its the actual building of the product every day reliably and efficiently thats the thing you really get benefit from and the ability to create this build script with a nice gui tool is an added bonus.
If anything its the ability to run automated builds that should cost money and the gui tool (if anything) should be given away for free .
Why not have a build server that finalbuilder is installed on and run your builds on this. Developers can build there own code branches easily on it (over remote desktop or vnc) and everyone is happy.