Red Gate surprised the .NET community today by announcing that .NET Reflector will become a paid product. In March, version 7 will be released with a $35 price tag. Unfortunately, current versions of Reflector are set to expire on May 30th.

Good for the Community

At first glance, this is bad for developers. I often use Reflector to find out what’s happening behind the scenes of an assembly, and I sometimes demonstrate this and encourage others to make it part of their toolset. $35 isn’t a lot of money, but people working from home will be less likely to try it out and discover the benefits that knowledge brings.

I have long derided the preponderance of free applications in the iPhone marketplace. The presence of them stifles competition and gives many fewer choices. Why develop an app when it can’t compete? The effect of making Reflector a paid product is that it will generate competition. I’ve considered writing a Reflector-like program myself, but there was no point to it since the original was free, easy-to-use, and worked for almost every scenario I needed.

I predict competition will be coming from commercial (there’s already a teaser for one) sectors to the open source community.

Bad for Red Gate

I understand why Red Gate made this decision. After all, they were supporting a program for 2 years with no revenue. However, they pretty much had a lock on the market. That lock will be removed, losing them potential customers for other products. The value isn’t in revenue generation, the value is in proliferation and clients for other products.

The best tactic would have been to make a Community edition for free; with restrictions on business use. Then charge $35 (or even a hundred) for the standard edition.

We have until May 30th to make a decision whether to purchase Reflector 7 or find an alternative.