My take on IFBIN

Posted on Thursday, July 21, 2005 in the Flash category.

Today, Ted Patrick released IFBIN. In its simplist form, it is a code distribution service. While I think the idea is good, the implementation has a couple flaws. This article isn’t meant to bash any single person, or company. Just my viewpoints on a certain project/company. Please do not take this as me bashing you :)

$350 a year?

How many people are going to be willing to shell out $350 a year for this service? Take the DRK’s for example. A good amount of people balked at the idea of paying $99 for a CD of high quality components, and applications (not saying this was the downfall of the DRK, just pointing it out). I think the price here needs a little bit of a breakdown. Is there going to be support included with these examples? Will you get FULL commercial access to this code? Can I distribute modified code?

I do think there is a market for selling code. This article wasn’t meant to debate the commercial/noncommercial aspects of the community. Take for example, Joshua Davis selling his Praystation CD for $35. That’s a price that people can deal with, and if I am not mistaken, isn’t he one of the highest end Flash Developer/Designer?

Where’s the Community?

Where would the Flash community be without people like Joey Lott releasing his Actionscript library for free, or Keith Peters releasing his Flash experiments for free, or the now hundreds of blogs placing example code on their sites? These are all high quality developers, releasing high quality examples… for free. I can’t count on the number of people that I have heard say “Damn, there is a shitload of free content to learn from in the Flash community” or “It’s amazing the amount of great developers that are willing to give out this information for free”. This is what community is all about, am I wrong? Sites like Flashkit, Ultrashock, Actionscript.org, and Kirupa are based on open source code.

I know that IFBIN isn’t going to take any of this away, I just truthfully don’t see the point in it. In my opinion, I would rather either 1) Create my own example to further my knowledge. 2) Take the extra 10 minutes, and search Google for an example near to the same of that on IFBIN. It is going to take a lot from IFBIN to impress people enough to spend $350 a year for code.