Over the last couple of days I've mentioned Radio UserLand. I haven't been fair to the people at UserLand Software.

Not because of what I said... (I won't take it back, what I said was what I felt at the time, this is a weblog, real-time and personal) but because of what I didn't say.

What I didn't say was this:

UserLand totally deserves to charge for Radio UserLand. Think of all the money and energy that team has put into it. Gotta be over $500K, if not close to $1M already, and close to 7 man years of effort! If you spent that kind of money and sweat you'd deserve a return too.

If Radio was something like $50 I'd buy a copy of the software for each of my computers. It's great software, it's easily worth that much to me, because I know how to make it sing like few people do. (I've been using Frontier heavily since '96)

But I was only thinking of me. I was upset that my dream of a free Frontier runtime to develop apps for was evaporating in front of my eyes.

Apparently Radio UserLand will be free as it is now, for the final release and for some time after that. That's great! What they intend to say on the home page is they don't promise it'll be that way forever.

So it wasn't a bait and switch. It was unclear communication, and not giving the benefit of the doubt. Humans do both every day.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming... I hope everyone gets this Radio virus. :-)