
.NET Reflector no longer a free tool - An open letter to the .NET community - amirmc
http://www.red-gate.com/products/dotnet-development/reflector/announcement
======
danielmason
It seems like most messages of this type try to pretend that it's not about
money. The worst is when a company uses lines like "mutually beneficial" or
"we're confident this will be better for our customers." When I read that, I'm
not just getting unpleasant news -- I'm getting unpleasant news from someone
who thinks I'm stupid.

Redgate's message is candid and addresses me like a grown-up. I think that's
much better.

~~~
damien7579
A good point and they're making things simpler in the process - here's the
product, it's $35 and this is what it does - no more messages, reminders about
a pro version and removal of timebombs. Plus future versions will probably get
even more serious features because they can justify it commercially with
invested time vs income.

You know where you stand.

------
krobertson
$35 isn't bad, and Reflector is an awesome tool. It'll pay for itself it no
time. If it started generating some revenue, they could probably give more
time to it and make it even better.

As a developer, you need to maintain your toolset. $35 is small fries. Sure,
enterprisey .NET has a slew of expensive profilers, testing frameworks, and
everything, but I think the price for Reflector is very reasonable.

Other fields are far more used to paying for their tools. Construction,
mechanics, machinists, mechanical/electrical engineer.

~~~
timrobinson
But Reflector was free for years until Red Gate took it on. And since then,
Red Gate haven't done a lot with it to justify the cost: apart from the Visual
Studio addin, the basic functionality is the same.

~~~
kenjackson
The Pro version did add support for debugging which is pretty awesome. The
only problem is that you can't add breakpoints into arbitrary points in the
IL. You have to be able to access it via the object browser, which requires a
public class/method. If they fixed that it would be worth twice its price.
Now, I think the technology is great, but not useful for me.

~~~
johnzabroski
I didn't know that. Thanks for the info about the debugging support. I guess I
have to give them credit for that.

------
cheald
I'll preface this my saying that the last time I touched .NET was about six
years ago, but my biggest turnoff with the .NET community was that it seemed
like everyone wanted their $5, $10, $50 for _everything_. Libraries and tools
that I could get for free with C++ or Ruby or Python seemed to all have price
tags associated with them in .NET world. I don't remember the last time I saw
the source for an assembly on GitHub et al.

I don't mind paying for _good_ tools (and I would absolutely class Reflector
as one), but there seem(s/ed) to be this very top-down mentality in the .NET
world that everyone in every step of the chain has to make a buck. Reflector
was a shining example of a great free tool in a sea of pay-for dreck, and it's
quite sad to see that example die.

It's a bit disappointing, because this mentality seems like it really does a
lot to stifle hobbyist exploration of the platform when it's doing cost you
$48 in assorted widgets to build the toolset you need to try out an idea.

Edit: I should clarify that I don't think this is a bad thing, and I
absolutely feel that Reflector justifies the price tag. The story just sparked
some memories of my time in .NET that go a long way towards explaining why I'm
not a .NET developer today. My time doing .NET development was in a
professional context for my employer, so it's not like I couldn't get the
tools due to cost issues, but the massive culture gap left an impression on
me.

~~~
krobertson
I still don't get why individual developers are so cheap. It is a paradox.

$35 is nothing. I totally believe in supporting a good product with a very
reasonable price.

Compare $35 for Reflector to $800 for TypeMock... $200 for Resharper... $300+
for dotTrace.

If you use something daily, <$50 is nothing... even <$100.

~~~
rayvega
Comparing the price of each tool _individually_ yes. However, if you add them
all up then it really starts to be costly if you want to use most of those
tools. You are limited in what you can budget for as an individual developer
and are forced to look at the _marginal_ cost of each new purchase as well as
the opportunity cost of not buying some other tool unrelated to your purchase.

(Just in your example, we are already at $1335 not including the price of
Visual Studio itself since the free express edition does not support add-ins
such as ReSharper and other productivity tools)

~~~
mkr-hn
I always assumed SharpDevelop supported VS plugins.

------
icey
Hmmmm. A forum ostensibly targeting people who want to be in the business of
making money with software up in arms about a company trying to make money
with software. Am I allowed to call this ironic?

~~~
xpaulbettsx
The thing is though, .NET Reflector used to be Freeware, written by a guy in
his spare time (incidentally, who is now an architect on Blend). He sold it to
Red Gate, who keep trying to monetize it in increasingly intrusive ways
(forcing updates, popping dialogs, etc).

While I understand Red Gate's need to make a return on their work, they've
gone about it in an unpopular way, trying to force people to pay for an extra
feature (debugging through code w/o source) that many people simply don't
want.

~~~
robin_reala
Older versions look like they’ll remain freeware; you can’t really begrudge
Red Gate for charging for future work.

~~~
xpaulbettsx
No, they won't. Red Gate has timebombed them so they'll stop working in March.

~~~
amirmc
AFAIK Reflector's been that way since before Red Gate got it.

~~~
jcl
In previous versions, I was stuck by how terribly Red Gate implemented the
"time bomb". You run Reflector one day and an innocuous dialog comes up saying
"A new version of Reflector is available. Do you want to upgrade? OK/Cancel"
And if you click "Cancel", it exits, _while silently deleting the executable
from the disk_.

I can't think of another program that violates user expectation quite so
thoroughly.

------
blahblahblah
Is there any programmer on the planet who has trouble justifying the ROI of a
$35 expenditure for a useful tool? This is a total non-issue.

------
space-monkey
Reflector is a great tool. They should charge if they can.

------
joebo
I'm disappointed. There are many other options for licensing that would bring
in revenue without hurting the solo developer or non-commercial developer. It
could be free for non-commercial use, or it could be limited to a 3 users
within a corporate environment. I believe their revenue will come from
companies adding it to their developer tool budget, not from the individual.
Let the individual love it at home and then ask for it at work. Every company
I've worked at was honest about paying for 'commercial use' or more than X
users.

~~~
kenjackson
I pay $59 for a Roku box I watch at home -- why wouldn't I pay $35 for
Reflector?

------
fmavituna
Nice and short interview with Red Gate CEO about this :
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKnEjiSGZLA> which explains commercial reasons
and why they thought it was possible to keep it free and why they changed
their mind

------
Shanewho
So how long until someone else makes a free, open source version...?

~~~
tptacek
(For the benefit of the class: the .NET Reflector decompiles compiled .NET
binaries back to cross-referenced source code.)

Not very. Lots of shops have nascent versions of the underlying mechanism in
Reflector; for instance, if you need to instrument .NET programs for testing,
you have a good chunk of it.

On the other hand, Reflector has a very effective UI, and $35 isn't even a
rounding error. There will be more free alternatives to Reflector now, but I
for one will probably be happy to shell out a trivial sum of money to keep
using the best one.

~~~
abyssknight
Just wanted to say that this is perhaps the most accurate response to this
sort of situation that I've heard in awhile. If it is a good piece of work,
why not pay for it? The time it would take to verify a FOSS solution meets
your needs already outweighs the $35 perpetual license fee. Not to mention,
this thing rocks.

For fun and profit, peek into some Silverlight containers and run Reflector on
the DLLs.

~~~
rbanffy
> If it is a good piece of work, why not pay for it?

I only hope they don't timebomb the paid version like they did the freeware
version.

~~~
steveklabnik
The announcement explicitly says it doesn't contain a timebomb.

------
aforty
Reflector is a fantastic tool. I have no problem with them charging a very
fair price for it.

------
tomasr
Reflector is a great tool, no denying it, but it's been fairly buggy for me
since Red-Gate took it over.

Also, yes, $35 isn't much, provided the license is per-user. If it's per-
machine, it would cost most devs a _lot_ more (I'd need at least 5-6 licenses
for all my VMs + desktop + laptop). That's a whole different story.

I will say, though, that I have no interest or desire in the debugging or VS
integration features; those are useless to me.

------
georgemcbay
It always stings to have to pay for something you used to get for free --
basic human nature.

On the other hand, Reflector is either worth $35 or isn't. At a price that
low, the decision is pretty binary -- is the tool worth the cost of a decent
dining-out dinner or not? If not, live without it.

------
wingo
Their web page has a box on it; how quaint. I remember getting software in
boxes.

------
snprbob86
Looks like JetBrains is going to release an alternative:

[http://blogs.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2011/02/reflections-on-
rec...](http://blogs.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2011/02/reflections-on-recent-news/)

------
rbanffy
I think it's fair to say it was never free. It was only infinitely
inexpensive.

BTW, shouldn't the title make the distinction between free software and
freeware?

------
nlawalker
Correct me if I'm wrong, but existing versions will continue to be offered and
will be free - is that right? I thought Lutz Roeder agreed with Red Gate that
RG was free to improve upon Reflector and sell it, but that the original had
to be offered for free. Obviously the version upgrade counts as improvements,
but the original should still be offered for free.

~~~
timrobinson
"The free version will continue working until May 30, 2011."

[http://www.red-gate.com/products/dotnet-
development/reflecto...](http://www.red-gate.com/products/dotnet-
development/reflector/announcement-faq)

------
hippich
Yeah. I do not believe free but not open source can live for a long time. If
it becomes good - it will require more dedication to work on product. And this
could be achieved either by open source community or by charging for product.

------
ntulip
crap - will be sticking to my free version. Soon they will charge for access
to their own software documentation.

~~~
DrJokepu
You can't stick to your free version, I'm afraid. There's a built in
expiration date in the latest free version; after April 15th 2011 it will no
longer work.

~~~
DrJokepu
(As a side note, it would be interesting to use Reflector to decompile
Reflector itself and remove the expiration date or extend it to the far
future. I know it's illegal and unethical, but it would be a fun and
interesting exercise.)

~~~
jeffesp
I Reflectored Reflector once and I found that the source was obfuscated. I
don't think that would be a trivial task.

~~~
MichaelGG
Most compiled code doesn't have debug info and internal symbols. Yet, changing
something like an expiry date is often a trivial task. Obfuscation just means
you'll actually have to poke around a bit instead of just searching for
"isExpiryDateReached".

~~~
innes
Reflector was written by a smart guy. IIRC the obfuscation partly consists of
assemblies stored as resources in the executable assembly, and loaded
dynamically. But no doubt you're right - it could be disentangled.

Better and more ethical to re-write.

------
thisisfmu
In my view it is entirely fair game for them to charge for what they own but
this is also an instance of why to avoid the .NET ecosystem altogether.

The ethos I follow and many developers whose opinion I care about follow as
well is that platform technology and the most fundamental tools must not be
closed source.

The irony with Reflector is that while branded a debugging tool it is mainly
good for reverse engineering, so Red Gate are now effectively charging for
access to third parties' source code, which I personally find a bit troubling.

~~~
thisisfmu
whoever downvoted this to 0: what is wrong with this comment?

------
innes
Yes, yes, $35 is not a lot of money. But the convenience of being able to
download Reflector to any machine that you happen to be sitting at will be
lost as a result of this.

Looking forward to the Mono Reflector clone...

