
Ask HN: Royalty or fixed price? - c-smile
I am providing an software engine (library) that is used for UI rendering. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sciter.com if that matters.<p>The question is about pricing schema, when does it make sense to ask for royalty payments?<p>I see three major cases:<p>1. Desktop application that uses the engine, like https:&#x2F;&#x2F;notes.sciter.com<p>2. Desktop application - interface to particular device. Example printer configuration and maintenance application for particular vendor&#x2F;model.<p>3. UI of embedded device - no other UI on the device. De facto the engine plays role of GUI layer of the whole device that has nothing but frame buffer.<p>Is royalty, as a concept, a viable solution for software producers at all?
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kjksf
Majority of products like that i.e. SDK/libraries, are using fixed price. I'm
sure some can get away with royalty but that's rare.

Somewhat related: as someone who likes the idea of Sciter and tried to use it,
I had a hard time figuring the basics out and I think the best way to improve
your business would be:

1\. Improve documentation, especially add step-by-step tutorial for beginners.
The first article should not be "Engine architecture" but "Step-by-step guide
to build your first application with Sciter".

2\. The SDK (I tried both Windows and Mac) is super confusing. Multiple
executables, not clear what does what.

You should have separate versions for Windows / Mac / Linux because bundling
all platform executables into one increases confusion.

There are plenty of samples but no clear way of how to even launch them. I
spent way too much time figuring this out and had to write an alias for the
sciter executable to make this bearable (i.e. alias
sciter='/Users/kjk/Downloads/sciter-sdk/bin.osx/scapp')

There's a mish-mash of files that can be run directly and those that are
imported by the main code.

Ideally, if the sciter launcher in SDK is launched without arguments, it
should ask to load a sample from a file (pre-positioned in the samples folder)
or allow drag&drop sample files on a window or list samples and allow
launching them with double-clicking.

See how rebol-view does it [http://www.rebol.com/download-
view.html](http://www.rebol.com/download-view.html)

3\. Improve stability. The app crashed on some samples. Not a good first look.

Sciter is a great technology, but the experience of evaluating it is bad. I
would imagine at this time improving that would be the best way to make it
more popular.

~~~
c-smile
Agree in general about documentation.

"Ideally, if the sciter launcher in SDK is launched without arguments..."

sciter.exe and sciter.app are official demo "players" \- they allow to load
and run all examples - button "load". You run them without any command line
parameters.

usciter (and all other u[niversal] __ __demos) are built from the same sources
(C++ and HTML /CSS) on all platforms. usciter can be used for loading all
/samples/.

u __ __* samples demonstrate multiplatform micro-framework defined in sciter-
x-window.h, check[https://sciter.com/forums/topic/native-application-
structure...](https://sciter.com/forums/topic/native-application-
structure/#post-55323).

"The app crashed on some samples. Not a good first look."

Interesting, do you remember which ones?

