We started receiving too many requests for improvements and support. We
could not continue this work on free-of-charge basis. At the same time we
did not want to create another "dead" product (like Jalindi Igloo) and
decided to make the plug-in commercial. Its price covers our expenses for
improvements and support. Really, development of a plug-in of such quality
is a very hard task. It is much harder than creation of some independent
GUI for CVS (like WinCVS or Tortoise). It is not enough only to cover CVS
functionality, it is important to provide compatibility with SCC API, or
make the plug-in closer to the SourceSafe (we think that IDE's implementing
SCC API are tested mainly with the SourceSafe). For example, Igloo is not
SCC-compatible plug-in, and it can be considered mainly as a status showing
(checkin/checkout) plug-in. We tried to achieve full compatibility of our
plug-in with all SCC functions. During the plug-in development much more
problems arose than we had expected, but now all of them are solved.
So we made the plug-in commercial and sell it for 19$ USD per a single
license. Why is the price so low? Maybe the plug-in is of poor quality? No.
That's because we want to make it highly available even for non-commercial
users and users from not-rich countries (like ours). Also we do not charge
fee for CVS itself, SCC switcher utility and Conflict solver. These are not
our tools. We take payment only for work on the plug-in that we have
already carried out, for future improvements and for support.