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I've made a framework in C# that allow to develop a complete application with only few line of code.
I think that it will be usefull for some other, and that i need a lot of time for refine it.
I've not experience with opensource project and i need to know what is the best way to make some profit from it.
thanks in advance
UPDATE
I think that i'll release only a piece of the fw with opensource license and the rest with a commercial license. This because I do not have fully understood the opensource mechanism, and i don't wont to give year of work for free.
this means that if it work fine, all fw will be opensource a day.
thanks to everyone
The best way to profit from a one-person open source project is to use it as a portfolio item to get a good job. Making money from it any other way would probably take more effort than it's worth. Your type of project, in particular, would be very difficult to differentiate from the abundance of App-Inventor-type frameworks.
Generally speaking, the most profitable approach for Open Source companies to make money is to sell support licensing.
Given as your product is a framework, you might want to re-evaluate if you want to sell it, or if you want to release it as Open Source, as in your case I'm guessing your customers wouldn't generally be interested in support contracts.
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I release a bunch of tools for free, but recently I have began to sell an application, that has private research, and people have been able to get my source code, and one person publically released my entire source. I spent a lot of time on this program, just to have someone crack it, and release my entire source.
How can I go about protecting my program? I have tried HWID, but people are still able to crack it. I know I am limited by C#, but it the most convenient to use. I just need a way to protect my programs from people trying to do this.
You could have a look at the many obfuscation tools that are out there, for example these:
http://gapotchenko.com/eazfuscator.net
http://orangeheap.blogspot.nl
http://confuser.codeplex.com (succeeded by https://yck1509.github.io/ConfuserEx/ and then again by https://github.com/XenocodeRCE/neo-ConfuserEx)
http://ntoolbox.com)
Well, the problem with languages like C#/Java is that they are generally much easier to de-obfuscate. The way to secure this is generally to put this stuff into a webservice, but you said you couldn't really do that. What about porting specific non-trivial functions over to a language like C, and obfuscate that. Your C# program could then use reflection to make calls to this external/unmanaged dll. It would increase the difficulty for de-obfuscating, but the problem is that if someone wants it bad enough, they can figure it out as it is client-side.
It may be that legal action is the only real solution here, but this is not a site for legal advice, and I am not qualified to give it if it were.
Additionally, this could be a business decision. Consider Making your software open-source and post a donation link. I am also not qualified to give business advice, but this is worth considering. It may actually increase your revenue, not to mention the other benefits that come with releasing open-source software.
There's Dotfuscator (http://www.preemptive.com/products/dotfuscator/overview). But the best solution in some cases is to offer what you do as a web site (Software as a Service).
Consider this tool for example to convert VB to C#: http://converter.telerik.com/
Or this tool to format JSON: http://jsonformatter.curiousconcept.com/
This may or may not work for you. I don't know what the nature of the software you're trying to protect is.
No, your code needs to contain the information needed to decrypt itself, its an impossible problem to solve.
Your best solution is to put your intellectual property on a server in the cloud that only you have access to. Give your customers a unique login, audit their access to check for abuse, off load as much grunt work onto your customers machines, but keep your algorithms locked into the cloud.
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I've been working for a couple of years on a small project, almost by myself, with the eventual help of some colleagues. The project is getting out of my hands, because the size of the code is growing (around 20K lines now) and the initial expectations I had for it have outgrown my own ability and time. So now I want to open source it, with the hope to attract some contributors. My motivations for going open source are these:
The project is rather academic (a library of algorithms for scientific computing), and I don't really have any economic interest in it.
The project is getting too big for me to handle it by myself, and the number of features I've planned are enough to keep a small team motivated (I think).
It needs a lot of testing, not just unit testing, but testing in the real world to see if the API is easy to use, the performance is as expected, etc.
I'm sure it has a lot of bugs, but I can only find a few, since its me alone testing it.
It needs proper documentation, because the API is getting a bit complex.
Other than that, I think that the project could benefit from a comunity in terms of deciding which features are most needed, and creating a set of guidelines for the future development.
I'm using Git, so my first thought was to publish it on Github and/or Codeplex. Besides that, what would be the steps to help to slowly grow a community of users and perhaps developers around it? Do I need a domain of my own, or should I stick to Github/Codeplex? How do I set up a platform for collaboration between developers potentially geographically separated? Should I set up a mailing list? And most important, how do I attract people to use it and collaborate with it?
The project is a .NET library for optimization and machine learning, written in C#.
There is only one piece of advice I can give here; use Github. It is common, (pretty much) everyone knows about it, it is easy to use, and the community who you are trying to attract is already on it. It has a ton of tools which you may not have even thought about, but may come in handy. It it pretty much the perfect solution for what you're looking to do, so don't overthink it.
As for attracting people to use it and contribute, if it is something that is useful and good, people will find it. I have found a ton of obscure projects with a simple google. If someone googles for something related to your project (and it is appropriate named and such) they will likely find it. There isn't really much you can do to force a demand though, just let it happen. As for contributors, people who are using it will likely contribute they're additions back. Just be sure to stay actively involved in managing it (monitoring pull requests, etc). If no one is accepting requests or managing versions, contributors will likely start to give up on your project.
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Which is the best 3rd party library to use for exporting data and generating charts in the Excel from Asp.net. I have researched on .Net and found the following:
1. EPPlus: Since we are to work in a very tight schedule and the project is also not too long, so we will not be having much time to resolve issues if we get stuck somewhere after using the component. Since that is an open source library, so the time guarantee to get a help to get the issue resolved cannot be there.
2. Spreadsheetgear2012: This seems to be a good library and its site seems to show a good amount of charting examples.
3. Aspose.Cells: This also seems to be a good library and its site seems to show good charting examples although its a bit pricey, but their support seems really good and they seem very open to new ideas from clients to implement in their product and release a new version.
We are not able to take a final call whether to go for Spreadsheetgear2012 for .Net or Aspose.Cells. Any details and ideas will be highly appreciated.
The comparisons that I was able to find on internet for these products were pretty old (around 4 years back).
Our main application is online interaction and reporting from a spreadhseet, rather than generation and downloading of other spreadsheet files. We tried quite a few spreadsheet deployment options and in the end went with Spreadsheetgear. We found it to be very simple to set up, fast and flexible for this purpose. Their online examples and support are also very good.
We have moved on from their examples and have been able to set up their API with an MVC3 ASP.NET framework. It is quite a task to get it working but in the end MVC makes for a very neat code structure and much faster deployment of applications. The combination is highly recommended.
What is the most important to you? Cost, long term plan or support?
The first one is free so if cost is your biggest constraint, you really don't have options.
The second one is cheaper than your last one but it seems to have a smaller user community.
So if you run into trouble, where do you find help?
The third one provides a full series of other related products too. If you think you may need other products later, then you can bundle your existing license and that can save you money.
I am using the third one at work and think it's a good product. They have large user community and their support is responsive. But it does come with a hearty cost.
You are missing another player in this space that, while not as spiffy or as speedy to plug-and-play as the paid options, could perhaps be enough to get you where you need to go with your spreadsheets: NPOI. Even if you don't use it for your current project, it still could be worth looking into as a tool to use at a later point.
CodePlex
http://npoi.codeplex.com/
Scott Mitchell on NPOI
http://scottonwriting.net/sowblog/archive/2011/06/08/export-an-ado-net-datatable-to-excel-using-npoi.aspx
Leniel Macaferi on NPOI
http://www.leniel.net/2009/10/npoi-with-excel-table-and-dynamic-chart.html#sthash.VZ4NjvZK.dpbs
Zach Hunter on NPOI
http://www.zachhunter.com/2010/06/improved-npoi-exportdatatabletoexcel-function/
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We're evaluating SharpKit as a possible technology to write an AJAX application, as we already have much C# code that we believe will work well after translating to JavaScript.
We're aware of ScriptSharp and other related technologies - there are many Stack Overflow threads about them, and this question is specifically about SharpKit only.
We have several concerns, hence are looking for real world experiences with SharpKit. In particular:
The one app built using SharpKit is the coderun IDE. While impressive, it is just one app, and a closed source one at that.
There are apparently no good app-sized sample projects built on SharpKit.
The SharpKit documentation is extremely poor - no in-depth conceptual overviews or tutorials, just a few 5 minute videos and a class library. (When will toolkit vendors learn that a generated class reference maketh not a user guide?)
There is no forum - so we can't determine how much this toolkit is actually being used. For all we know, this is a barely supported project written by three guys. What has your support experience been like?
There is no phone contact or support - which again raises a red flag regarding support.
Please don't respond with ScriptSharp or other information - we're just trying to evaluate SharpKit here.
Check out DesktopBrowser, an open-source project that uses SharpKit.
See #1
There's also an MSDN style reference for all internal and external libraries, you can find it here.
Check out 'SharpKit Support' forum at google groups.
Contacting support is initially done by email at support#sharpkit.net.
Cheers
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I want to set up an opensource community project in .NET, how do I go about it?
With my project, I started by choosing one of the many open source licenses (went with Apache 2.0). Then I added a LICENSE-file to my project, copy/pasted the license there and did the 'required' headers to each source file.
After that, I chose a project platform (or watchamacallit). I skipped SourceForge and chose Google Code instead, later moved to Assembla + GitHub. I upladed my source to the provided SCM-system (first SVN, later Git).
Alas, the hard part isn't selecting a license, getting your source public, documenting your stuff to a wiki or writing tickets. The hard part is to build the (successful) community around your project. For that you need an interesting project, people that are interested in your interesting project and a platform to connect these dots together. A dash of luck and/or reputation don't hurt, not the very least.
choose which license (bsd, gpl, etc.) you wish to release under
add README.txt, LICENSE.txt
there are many excellent options for free public hosting. You can see a lot of good comments here:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29736/what-open-source-hosting-service-should-i-use
www.codeplex.com would be another good starting place.
Go to:
http://code.google.com/hosting/
And follow the directions in the:
Create a new project link.
You can use other portals too.
You want to look create a repository on SourceForge or Github (those are the two I know of, there may be others). That would be the first step.
Setting up a blog, if you already do not have one, and blogging about your progress, frustrations, and everything in between during the journey is also good for few reasons. It will serve as a note to self for you for future projects. It will also be a good thing for others who want to do something similar to look at as a roadmap. Finally, its a great way to get more and more interest in your project.
You also might want to look into Mono Project (http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page) and use that instead of Visual Studio so that there is not a barrier for entrance for others to join your project. Those Visual Studio licenses are not cheap and Mono is free. While I have not worked with the Mono environment in a while, I have heard a lot of good things about it.
I hope this helps and good luck to you.