There’s a Biml user group in Amsterdam and Koos van Strien took notes:
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Historically, Varigence has always given away lots of their work for free, and they’ll continue to do so. There are few (maybe no) companies giving this percentage of their work away for free, without having the barrier set at “if you want to start working really, you need our paid product”)
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When features are introduced as free, they will stay free forever. Sometimes this means the introduction of features in the free product needs to be postponed to see the complete impact.
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According to Scott, this is shown in the release of Biml Express: they could’ve easily dropped some features and move it into the paid versions of Biml, but they didn’t. Only added new features.
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The “free while in beta” announcement on Biml Online is mainly a lawyer thing – you can expect BimlOnline to remain free too.
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If a good SaaS-model is developed, the tools will all be free. But we’re not there yet…
This sounds like it was a pretty long discussion with Scott Currie and I’m insanely jealous that there’s a Biml user group but it’s nowhere near me…