Commercial extensions
By glazou on Monday 16 May 2005, 11:52 - Mozilla - Permalink
This is a major change in the Mozilla world: for the first time, an extension to Firefox is a commercial product and activated by a registration key. Don't get me wrong, I am not complaining at all; on the contrary, I think commercial extensions are one the best opportunities for open-source software ever. That's a wave Disruptive Innovations is going to ride.
Comments
First time? Don't think so. See the great extension Onfolio. To Manage your bookmarks and your feeds and tu publish your weblog.
see www.onfolio.com/
And... Lektora.
www.lektora.com/firefox.h...
But perhaps you meant : "an extension exclusively to Firefox" ?
I'm not opposed to paying for an extension, but I can't imagine paying $70 (US) for one. And I certainly can't imagine doing that several times. "I use a free software program, but I've spent $400 on extensions to get all the functionality I need." I couldn't do that if I wanted to -- with Firefox, Thunderbird, or Nvu. It seems to me that many of the people who could do that (with Nvu, for example) would choose to spend the money on Dreamweaver instead. Not all, but many would. If commercial extensions become a trend, I hope the price of future extensions is a little more reasonable.
What bothers me about this is when the group putting out a core foss product begins developing their own commercial extensions for it.
What bothers me about this is that there is very little incentive for them to make as good as upgrades to their core product as possible when those upgrades could interfere with a business model they are undertaking.
In terms of this firefox extension, I think they've gone about it the right way as there is no ethical conflict of interest, but I wonder if there are many groups in the future of foss that might find themselves taking part in that conflict of interest.
That is just something I have been thinking about lately. I really don't see it as a problem for customizable services that are made specifically for one buyer like progeny, but I do see this as a serious problem for those who want to take a mass market approach.
Thanks Daniel.
Just so people know, this is not just an extension for Firefox, it is 2 standalone products (anti-spyware and Anonymous surfing) that come bundled with an extension so you can control them through Firefox.
You don't even need firefox as the products run by themselves. I believe there is even a similar toolbar for IE already.
What's so cool here is that I believe it is the first time a commercial product will offer both Firefox and an extension from a product that you can find on the shelf.
Besides that, others have already had a Firefox extension for their products (available for download/install).