To Fred and Timo: Can we have a discussion about the future?

[Marc56us]

(removed)

[Mistrel]

I thought about the easiest way to do this and feel that this might be it:

We get a new section on the forum for "Features and Bounties" with three sub-sections: "Proposals", "Accepted", and "Rejected".

This is NOT the same as "Feature Requests and Wishlists" but rather we propose a feature and the staff chooses to either accept or reject it after consideration of the work involved. Once a proposal is accepted then we can post monetary commitments in sort of an ad-hoc voting style. Basically, we just post our commitment as a response.

We can come up with other rules but I feel that a simple one where you are not allowed to respond to an accepted proposal unless you are making a commitment would help us to judge popularity by the reply count.

Does anyone have any other ideas?

[the.weavster]

I really love this idea and would be happy to spend my money to evolve PB, but we need some structured way to do so.
If now anyone throws in his own wishes, this whole thread will turn into a mess and we will win nothing!

I agree this thread will become a mess but I don't agree we will win nothing. Imo without some concrete offers being put down nothing structured will be created and all this will just remain idle talk.

The mail library is currently just a toy. In order to change it into a tool, more improvements are needed.

Well put down your request / offer
If Mail is implemented as you request but I still get the functionality I require I'll still donate.

[Fred]

Let us think a bit more about it and we will do a special page (on forum or on website) to handle it smoothly.

[Cyllceaux]

Let us think a bit more about it and we will do a special page (on forum or on website) to handle it smoothly.

+1

thx

[the.weavster]

Let us think a bit more about it and we will do a special page (on forum or on website) to handle it smoothly.

From my professional view PB could have still a very nice future in the embedded world. There is C and just C and maybe Assembler....and perhaps some C++. Why not PB for a Linux based most embedded platform: ARM.

I would also happily pay another license fee for this as a separate product even if the first iteration only had PB's variable types, structures, lists, maps and library. Just enough essential parts to enable creating wrappers that could be used to glue together functionality from some of the ubiquitous libraries you get with a GNU/Linux distro.

[RSBasic]

It's great !

+1

Maybe it would be a good idea to split Versions.

A Beginner-friendly-one and a professional-one.

In my opinion, this is not necessary because all functions are optional.

i think Fred should change the way of the purebasic licensing. [...] so who own purebasic 5 should pay for v6

+1

I think a bounty on suggestions is a fantastic idea

+1

How about founding/donations something like this:

+1

Let us think a bit more about it and we will do a special page (on forum or on website) to handle it smoothly.

Thank you

[hoerbie]

Hi,

this is really an interesting discussion, so some points from a more quiet reader:

I would really hope, that we can get a mixture of voting for new features and getting them paid like in crowd funding. The actual +1 in the forum and the "you can contact us and make a bid" isn't good enough for merging interests and bringing PB to the future.

I'm thinking of a tool like this: maybe everyone can search, if other people need the same feature or if not post a new concrete missing feature, and this could be shown to all logged in users with for example voting
-nice to have, but not willing to pay for
-would pay 50€ for it
-would pay 100€ for it
-would pay 200€ for it
....
As we all are different in our programming style and needs, I would not make a selection for "not interested in this feature", because if we only talk about paying for new features, the only reason for a decision should be the people needing and paying it I think there will be a lot of things, where enough people would be willing to pay something for, but that also a lot others don't need.
(If help is needed, I would be willing to program something in PHP for this voting/funding.)

Additionally to crowd paying for interesting features I would be willing to pay a yearly license fee, if there would be a more noticable progression of PB. (You only have to take a look at the big US software company selling its office package, getting worst with every subversion and not listening to its users but billing about 100€ per year for it....)

And to the discussion about PB for beginners or professionals:

I think there are a lot of good things for beginners, but also there are missing some things, making programming easier for beginners or making things needless complicated.

I'm programming self employed for about 25 years in different languages and really love the "Basic" style, but I never was a big memory, pointer or object juggler. Having done a lot of programming in the good old GFA Basic, for example strings could contain NULL Bytes and used with convert functions for a lot more things then only real text. And GFA had the commands Insert and Delete to put elements in an array or delete from an array at a numbered array position with automatic movement of the other elements back or forth. I know, a lot of things could be done with memory or maybe lists or maps, but it is not so simple.

On the other side we have a lot more internet things now than years ago, but here PB still isn't fit for the year 2018 with its "TLS-encrypt every connection"-hype. A lot of things again could be done the hard way using libraries like curl, but for a lot of beginners I think it would be helpful, when everything in the Ftp, Http, Mail and Network libs could be used with TLS.

And taking a look to the data privacy/protection hype of may 2018 for example there could be some simple en/decrypt functions for reading from and writing to files. Again, one can put data in memory, encrypt it and then safe it to disk, but this again for me is not Basic.

Just my cents,
Hoerbie

[bbanelli]

Let us think a bit more about it and we will do a special page (on forum or on website) to handle it smoothly.

I can definitely agree with this - perhaps even something we would access via our Purebasic members area login, completely without forum.

It is a bit... profane to barter like this on forum, honestly.

[skywalk]

Profane is too harsh a word in this case. Haphazard is more appropriate. Which is why it should be handled in a separate section. I prefer the "popularity" of proposed changes are known, instead of hidden. Crowd funding can accelerate Fred's decision process. I look forward to funding more features!

[swhite]

Hi

I use PB for commercial projects all the time. I would certainly be willing to put money toward certain features or pay a yearly license fee. I am not interested in seeing PB become a bloated slow product but there are some features that are required in commercial environments now that were not needed in the past. To me the biggest one is the need for SSL support in FTP, HTTP and SMTP and Sockets.

What I like very much about PB is that it is easy to understand, fast, produces lean standalone executables and runs on both Windows, Linux and MAC.

Simon

[swan]

I think this is all a great idea. But I also think an annual licence fee will go a long way to achieve the same without the complications ....

[applePi]

using a bounty system or whatever for such a very long list of requests, will push a great stress over the developers, they are humans, i know programmers who suffer from Influenza when they do programming with stress. you know programming is a killer when done uncomfortably.
programming is not like a cars productions Lines, it is not done by automatic machines.
this is why i suggest selling PB on the base of versions, which are released over time. and not one payment for ever upgrades. as i can see there are what resembles this idea between the people here

[oreopa]

I'd just like to add my 2 cents worth:

Ideally I'd like lifetime license to stay as it is. However, if it changes, I'd like to think that there would be two licensing schemes:

1. For professional profit making use.
2. For private non-profift use.

License 2 would cost much less, but the program would still be no different to the version supplied for license 1. It requires ppl to be honest of course, but I think most professional users would be honest. See https://www.reaper.fm/purchase.php - I think it works somewhat.

You may use the discounted license if:
You are an individual, and REAPER is only for your personal use, or
You are an individual or business using REAPER commercially, and yearly gross revenue does not exceed USD $20,000, or
You are an educational or non-profit organization.

Obviously it wouldn't need to be so generous ($20,000!)... but I like the principle and I think it works.

[the.weavster]

I think this is all a great idea. But I also think an annual licence fee will go a long way to achieve the same without the complications ....

The annual license fee doesn't enable you to push for the features that really matter to you. I was eagerly awaiting details of what was going to be new in 5.70 - were we going to get better network commands, password support for the packer library, improvements to ListIconGadget, better WebGadget, ...? When the announcement came there was nothing there that really interested me at all. So now I'm back to having my fingers crossed for the next release with no way to influence what will be added.