I think your license was more than fair, especially considering some of the other docks out there.  I use a few, and many of them are licensed per year to give you an example of what some others do.  The only change that I see that you could have made is to offer license to those that did donate- therefore anyone who was whinging after that would be people who utilized the software for free and didn't donate.

-wraith808 (August 04, 2010, 12:55 PM)

I agree with you regarding Circle Dock's competitors and I also agree that those who donate should be offered a free license for the commercial version and I would have taken-up your suggestion. However, as the freeware version allows running as many copies as the user desires on up to two PCs that he owns and for personal (not business) use, giving a single-user license would have been more restrictive.



Mark

Let's be very clear about something. The cold, hard facts are that almost no Circle Dock user has shown their appreciation by making a donation to help defray the development costs. In the eleven months that I've been working on this project, a total of $167.37 has been donated to me personally. Of that sum, the biggest portion didn't come from individual donors/users but from this site! Only one Circle Dock user has made a donation, the remainder came from non-users.

And yet the users demand that bugs are fixed quickly and new features implemented and, in 99% of cases, we have obliged, very often receiving no thanks for our efforts let alone a donation to help offset our costs.  There are real costs involved here: the development tools (Visual Studio) is not free**, our electricity is not free and nor is our broadband internet. We are very fortunate - and extremely thankful - to mouser and DonationCoder for hosting this forum and our downloads. Just top give you some idea, that $163 I've accumulated in 11 months - that's the equivalent of 5 week's internet connection charges for me.

I am not going to force this issue and it's pretty clear what we must do. We will re-enable the downloads for Eric's last GPL version, both source and binary, and leave it at that.



Mark

** Eric Wong's releases were built using Visual Studio Express. I have been notified officially by Microsoft that software developed using the free Express editions may not be distributed publicly whether for profit or not. Hence all the versions I made were compiled using a paid-for copy of Visual Studio.

This option has been renamed for Version 2 to "Display in last position without moving cursor".



Mark