14 Years of Designing Building and Marketing

A couple of weeks ago it came to my attention that CRELoaded (Chain Reaction) had drastically altered their marketing stance for the open source program CRELoaded.

With the release of version 6.3, pricing has changed from the normal OS progression of free/pay for more features/pay for even more features, to an annual license, even for the previously free version.

The annual plans are for about $100/Year, for the standard version, (Free 30 day trial), and $295/Year for the Pro., which, if memory serves, used to be $75/one time payment.
There IS an extra $150 module added to it.

Response on their boards has not been favorable, and some downright rude.
Management has Gerald Scott as community liaison and one of his methods of dealing with dissention is to delete threads and posts.
This is also not going over well.

It seems that more than just the price has been changed however.
The new stance is designed to bring developers and designers under the “wing” of CRELance, their developer job board.

In theory this is a good idea.
In practice, not so much.

Jobs so far seem slanted towards custom modifications and add ons. Not my market.
I target small business owners that want a fast, complete, store front with an admin that allows them to add to content and configure.

When I started developing with PHP/MySQL programs it was with osCommerce, and one of the things I did not like was the “No Commercial Links” in their forums.
When I discovered the CRELoaded ‘fork’, I was pleased to find that commercial links were welcomed on their forums.
This coupled with the CRE system that had over 50 modules installed enticed me to switch to developing in CRELoaded, and I have done 59 sites in it so far.

Now the rules have changed.
No longer are commercial links allowed but the signature files with them have been disallowed retroactively.
None of the previous 250+ posts I made have my signature file showing.
This seems like a breach of contract.
I made those posts over 3 years, spent my time helping others, in return for having my business link on my posts.

The only link I am allowed to have now is to my CRELance page, http://www.getcre.com/crelance/vendors.php?id=689 which is not much and costs $5 a month.

Another concern is a privacy issue.
With the 6.3 upgrade comes a site tracking script installed in the source code by CRE.
According to them this is to see how many copies “are in the wild”, but is actually to monitor use with a view to disabling the admin for reasons of non payment of annual fees.
The code used is a Google tracker and seems to be against Google’s TOS which says code must be on website under account’s control, and they aren’t.
The code will track every page the user goes to in the admin.

With the new annual licensing structure they must have some means of stopping sites from running (properly) should they not pay their renewal fee.
Their choice is to disable the admin while leaving the site running.
As the program is released under an open source license, and the first freedom of said license is to allow access to the source code, this is technically a loophole.
They would not be stopping access to the source code, but cutting off access to the admin. One could go into the source code and remove the registration requirements, defeating their system.

Chain Reaction seems to think that it must control the market and freeze out developers that will not come under their umbrella.
Due to their actions there is an exodus of the top contributors, some of which who are working on their own forks.

I have an idea on how this could be turned around, but would like to hear from readers before presenting it.

What do you think of the new pricing and marketing model that Chain Reaction has presented?

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I will be doing regular blogs on a variety of subjects, SEO, using Open Source, building sites, hardware, software, networking, and everything in between.