If you directly compare the cost of licensing Iguana with support to getting a supported version of products that follow a ‘commercial open source model’ you’ll will find Iguana is actually less expensive in pure dollar terms.
This is forgetting completely about the time you’ll save in development thanks to Iguana’s key advantages like:
- Annotations giving visual debugging unmatched by any other environment.
- Data driven auto-completion.
- Integrated sample data for test driven development.
- Integrated source control.
- High attention to giving human understandable error messages.
- Raw speed.
- Easy set up combined with comprehensive documentation.
But going beyond the technical advantages, our business model offers puts less up front risk and expense on the customer:
- You get started with a very small up front license and support cost.
- We provide top notch documentation and pre-sales support.
- Because our product is not free there are no free loaders using the product without giving back to the product.
The ‘commercial open source’ model is not like a true grass roots community effort but represents a company exploiting a particular business model:
- Commercial open source products don’t have as much R&D put into them – they suffer from being open to being forked
- To make money these companies needs to convert free-downloaders into support paying customers which means:
- The publicly available documentation is not comprehensive.
- There is no pre-sales support – it’s up to you to figure it out yourself.
- The free product is tricky to install and get up and running. This generates demand for appliances.
- Many users freeload off the customers that do pay for support, appliances etc. i.e. if you pay, you are supporting many people who do not.
The market is large and there is room for many different types of approaches but hopefully this gives you a clearer picture of where Iguana fits into the overall eco-system and the benefits we can bring to you.