[reportlab-users] ReportLab Developer Network - RFC

[Jerome Alet]

On Wed, Feb 19, 2003 at 11:52:15PM -0000, Andy Robinson wrote:

> In the last year we put 90% or more of our effort
> into customer projects.  We survived the recession
> and paid debts off, even added a lot of new 
> functionality to our commercial products and some
> to the free ones, but generally did a poor job of
> documenting and packaging our software and supporting
> the user group.

wrt "supporting the user group", I beg to differ. I consider
you all do a *very good* job at helping people.

questions in this mailing list rarely remain unanswered.

> Some very good things have happened and we have
> an exciting business plan in front of us. 

Congrats !

> So, please let me know what you think and how this could
> be made to work for you...

With my *very-small-part-time* consultant cap, I'd say much like Doug :
PageCatcher might be helpful from time to time, but I've actually
no need for other products, and I probably can't afford 1000$/2000$ 
a year. I either use the base canvas directly or platypus and I'm
happy with them.

With my sysadmin-in-an-university cap, I can see places where products
like RML2PDF could be used, but unfortunately :

    * I've got no time for 'big' projects, only time for a lot 
      of 'small' different ones and only a few concern PDF.
      
    * Unless you have a reseller in our country then we can't buy,
      and even then it may prove to be difficult (highly centralized).
      Actual solution is to buy in our own name (like sharewares)
      and never get our money back (sometimes we do), or maybe use 
      'semi-illegal' ways to get it back, which might be possible under 
      some particular circumstances (we've *really* never tried).
      
wrt contributions, I'd like to do more, but for me it's only a question
of having the time to do so or not, not a question of receiving full
licenses for your products or not.

bye,

Jerome Alet