Question about Silver being free

I am interested in the question why you are giving away Fire and VS integration for free when only using Swift. You can actually do anything with this free option except you cannot use C# or Oxygene, or are there other limitations compared to the other editions? (Besides the other editions including a VC license?) Free sounds good at first, but I would actually be happier with your offer if I understood your business model behind it. Thanks.

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Also it looks like not many people are using the C# and most prefer to use Oxygene, maybe C# could also be made free, maybe only for Android.

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No worries, there’s absolutely no limitations to what you can do with Silver. Anything you can do with C# and Oxygene, functionality wise, you can do with Silver as well (language syntax and differences aside, of course).

Certainly. Our business model behind it is that we hope free exposure to Silver will (a) help grow the core compiler user base — a lot of functionality is shared between the languages, and more Silver users means a bigger cop system for Elements in general, and that benefits users of all 3 languages and (b) trigger some portion if free users to consider going for the full 3-language package and/or purchase one of the options to financially support the development. It’s a bit of a gamble, for us as a small company that does, strongly, believe in payed software.

It’s something we considered. but we do need to make some money somewhere, as we do like to pay salaries, buy food for our families and such stuff ;), We’re already doing a bit of a gamble with Silver being free, as it is, We’ll see how it goes…

thanx,
marc

Thank you for your answers. I think your Oxfuscator is certainly a product I would buy if I compiled a program to .NET. So maybe a good strategy.

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Note that Oxfuscator is not the same as Oxygene.

Totally agree, I myself am a firm believer of “Quality doesn’t come cheap” so don’t mind paying for things(IoT lol). Anyways, the reason I mentioned about C# being free was to make bigger players in the software industry take notice of you and maybe invest in your company. I am really amazed that a company like yours, with so many good technologies hasn’t been taken over by some bigger players.

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First, thank you for the great software!

And as for Silver - I think it’s a good strategy to make it free at least on start. There are missing features (i.e. auto-completion for C# is much better at the moment), it may have some bugs etc. And actually we need much more mature libraries to use in shared code to get real profit from switching - for WebSockets, JSON, SQLite, for working with files, image processing and so on.

So I think the value of Silver will grow when more users will create products, cross-platform wrappers and libraries. And one day Silver in Fire may become paid option and it will be ok, as it will provide top level developer experience.

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This is an interesting question. Are Fire and Silver always expected to be free? We are a team of Indie developers at the moment so this question is important to us before we invest in Fire, Elements and Silver.

Yes, Silver will remain free, in Fire and VS.

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Awesome Awesome Awesome! :smile: Good job guys!

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