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Re: Maintenance Fee and Small Feature Requests

I am sure this has been talked about a lot by people but I have never seen it mentioned here (maybe it was on the old forum), so here goes.

Why do we not all pay a yearly maintenance fee / update fee / subscription? Most software these days runs under a similar fashion and if you do not pay the fee you do not then get the latest upgrades, beyond the initial purchase. This can easily be applied to all existing users from a certain date onwards.

This does not need to be a huge fee and could be graded based on type of user or number of copies in use.

Surely with us all / most paying this we could see some of the small (and medium) additional features incorporated a lot quicker!? Such things as being able to search all the dictionary lists easier from the dictionary browser, having additional fields added to the import wizard, having more fields available to report on, seeing core xml reports increased to a more user friendly state - rather than users being required to know or learn how to program and write in Transact-SQL, seeing exchange routines between different recording packages implemented, etc.

There have been some really great advances over the past couple of years and I congratulate all who have contributed towards this, but I do not see why we as users should expect all this for free. Many people say yes great ideas to some of the feature requests, but few are willing to invest large amounts of money into them. Let's get round this in an easy and standard way with a maintenance fee.

Brian

Brian Miller
(Conservation Officer (Buckinghamshire), BBOWT)