Although, I do still think a “pay-per view” model might better fit this. I usually don’t download much code, but when I do, I like to download high quality code. So thus, I wouldn’t be able to use IFBIN, as I wouldn’t want to pay $350 for the one piece of code I need. However, I would be a lot more inclined to pay $50 (or whatever it is) for a piece of code that one time I need it. This way, you would also be able to increase price points for more complex code as well. Just a suggestion though

SO … IFBIN … where do we learn about this new service? As a webmaster of a 4+ year old web development community site I’d like to know more as it might be something our audience want to look into.

Oh and DO I read right? $350/y for access and then $$$ for licensing the ideas/code on top of that? Where is your price list/rate card?

Okay I should keep in mind this is beta ey … ah ah

ON the other hand, there are countless companies with a handful of pseudo flash developer/designers who can’t figure out how to sort an array, for example. If I look at my last company, this would be perfect for at least 5 of the people there. The ones that would come to me 5 times a day asking how to sort arrays.

1) I like the idea, i think it holds merit and I remember when I was learning FLASH i would of killed for a concept. That being said, i wouldn’t of paid the price tag associated nor would the companies i work for. Typically one would assume that those who are starting out in FLASH Development either do so on their own accord? or work for a company whom has just handed them a bit of FLASH work to be done.

I think the price point is probably the only “downside” to this concept. I can see how some companies who thrust on of their developers into the realm of FLASH would probably outleigh some cash for its consumption – yet, i can also see that in order to do that first there needs a lot more content provided. In that, what’s currently in the beta (realsing its beta) wouldn’t be enough, there would have to be a lot more content provided in order for it to get some momentum.

Concepts like this have been around though – one such that i’ve worked with was for NetObjects Fusion, on a concept like club.coolmaps.com – on the surface you’d think “as if anyone would pay for this crap” – they did, and done at a high rate.

But, it was done on a per module approach instead of a total package thats where i think it will again be a price point.

I’d offer the option for an “eat all you want” price but also a “pay per view” model. As to me that would at least give them a taste of the type of content being provided. (ie get them hooked and reel them in).

That to me is “WHY” community mx is successful.

The underpinning downside of this concept is, frankly the content is free already. they’d really have to diversify themselves from existing freely available content (sure you could say you are paying for ongoing hand-holding and aggregation of this content) but in truth all it takes is a developer to shift a payig customers perspective to freely available content and you could very well loose customer(s)

I’m neutral to its overall approach, i’d like them to succeed as anything that promotes a FLASH ver of MSDN could very well work!.

No problem Josh, your not bashing, your perspective is important.

First off, IFBIN is pro-community and we support this within the product today in several ways. First, IFBIN authors are 50% owners in the products so supporting IFBIN supports great developers directly. Second, we support the distribution of Free software under all Creative Commons and Open Source licenses. Keith’s Peters code is within IFBIN under a Creative Commons license and is free to download for anyone not just subscribers. We provide this as a service to our authors and as a free benefit to the Flash community.

All code under an IFBIN License provides the licensee with reuse rights and full source rights. You can use IFBIN examples within commercial software and within consulting projects without issue. There are no GNU licensing hooks and your modifications are yours. There are some exceptions for obvious reasons but we tried our best to keep these to a minimum. Simple is better.

Development is directed. A licensee can request examples for development and thus obtain solutions to problems that affect them directly.

Development can be sponsored. A licensee can fund development of very specific examples in a light consulting arrangement where the code is added to IFBIN after delivery to the sponsor.

All IFBIN code adheres to written development standards. Code must be formatted to spec and contain ample comments. We have a formalized QA process for code approval. Regardless of the author, you will find that every example is in a common readable format.

There are tons of great software/examples that never get shared into the community due to rights issues and consulting conflicts. IFBIN provides a licensing option for this class of code and enables it to actually be reused in a commercial format. I personally have 5+ source projects that I could not release due to rights issues with consulting clients especially with FLOW, SYNC, and source for all my Central apps. These find a perfect home within IFBIN. FYI, SYNC is a framework for writing socket servers and FLOW is a runtime component rendering toolset comparable to MXML.

On the price tag, $29 per month ($350 annum) is a very low cost for software that saves developer time and increases productivity. If you save 1 hour of development time per month, I am sure you will have paid for your IFBIN license many times over in the course of a year.

In the end, the decision to license our products is purely about saving time. If IFBIN saves you enough time, effort, and frustration, then licensing costs are a non-issue. That said, there are some who just do not like to license software.

Josh, thanks for posting your feedback. We will get these issues into our overall product message.

Regards,

Ted Patrick
IFBIN Founder / CEO

Go there now and try and find a Flash Movie that shows & explains how to make a layout engine for example and let me know how you get on.

first, i think it’s a solid idea; and from what i hear, some of the best swf captains out there are manning that ship, so i can’t wait to see waht this grows to be.

josh, looks like your rant is centred mainly around cost; I might never become an ifbin client, but i’ll pay 350 bucks any day, if i was getting some trully useful code that I couldn’t come up with or just didn’t have enough time to write, and if it came as a package I could just drop in and forget about :)… I don’t know the details of what their offering here shd be, but it seems to be along those lines… my main concern centers around licensing issues, but i’m sure they would have thought this through

i use a number of code snippet repositories, like BlueBook [http://www.zopelabs.com/] and the PHP snipplib [http://www.php-csl.com/snippets/]; and there are many more of these you can find, if you really really search; but I guess that’s the value proposition here—that you’ll have ‘almost’ all the code you want in one place when you need them; plus they’ll be well documented (you probably might even receive some support? probably pushing it.. hehe) and such.

Ted and co, consider writing an eclipse (insert generic IDE) plugin that ties into your service—let me cut/paste code from your service without ‘really’ shifting focus from what i was doing before… now that will be real value

I was going to metion CommunityMX, but i see jester got here first.

Besides, I’ll continue releasing stuff for free.