Just now I came across the fact that Go CMS was apparently dropped by Yabdab. Shortly before that I bought it and as a customer I was not informed with a word that the product will not be further developed.
It’s a pity because I like the products of Yabdab and have bought and run some of them. But most of all very annoying, because I don’t want to use a product for my customers which is finished. But that’s one of the things I’ve been doing for the last few months.
So they switched last year to “Unlimited” and drop it this year without a word. Not so the fine way in my perception.
If I remember correctly, this discussion came up recenlty with Nick Cates going out of business. I totally get your disappointment
But what you can do is checking the terms & conditions and ask for a refund. There’s is usually a note about included support or something and if this is no longer possible (as the company stops supporting the product without notice) you can cancel the contract.
EDIT to be more precise what I meant (and as @instacks pointed out, I wrote it completely wrong)
So, if you buy now a piece of software, and in some years time this software provider is no longer in business and cannot give you any more support, you want to “cancel the contract” and want to have a refund?
Well, it’s not exactly like this, but let me explain what I meant:
If the terms & conditions say that support and updates are given for, let’s say, one year (example!), you have to
tell existing customers who are still in this period you’re going to stop supporting the product (e.g. one year ahead, again, the year is just an example)
adapt the terms to a shorter period (as they will be part of any future contract) if you still want to sell the product until the very last day
be prepared for refund requests if the customer buys your product and you’re not able to deliver the support and updates you obliged to deliver (according to your own terms & conditions)
This depends of course on the terms & conditions and, as I said, if the business is still around.
Usually, you (as the business) try to avoid this cases by explicit paragraphs in your terms & conditions, but even then, there are legal requirements (depending on the place of jurisdiction) to protect customers, those are different for B2C and B2B contracts.
Luck btw. it not required: most (well, actually every) payment providers do offer buyers protection schemes. If a customer files a complain, it’s very likely that he gets his money back.
That’s on the side of risks when you start you’re own business.
Which is a pitty, as a stack or theme developer should be aware of its responsibilty: at the moment clients buy their products for their own services / business, they depend on the developers ongoing services.
You are right about that, of course. Most, or many, of us are also independent service providers and take some responsibility for their work.
Without wishing to seem overly provocative, I can’t help but point out what seems to me, at least, a weakness in your point.
If you are using an add-on which then breaks and you have no control over fixing it, then you are not taking responsibility for your work - you are functionally subcontracting that responsibility to the add-on dev.
In my view, that is the situation you put yourself in when you drag something onto a page, no idea how it works or how you would fix it if it stops working; then hit publish and get paid for it.
This has come up before and it just seems to me a little unrealistic that parts of the RW (well, Stacks really because RW itself is just the admission price) community think that dropping $20, $40 or more on an add-on means that the dev can and will support it across all your (paid for) client sites until such time as your obligations to your client are fulfilled.
Why not put something in your contract with the client explaining that you are dragging and dropping these little stack things to make their pages look nice and add functionality - but because you don’t know how the underlying html/css/js/php actually works, if it breaks and the add-on developer isn’t around to fix it you might be a bit stuck?
Part of our risk management is to find the right partners for outsourcing, e.g. plug-ins and stacks. You already had your into Squarespace, Wordpress and the likes - thats a bit different, you pay more for themes and extensions, but you get sometime / usually the better support, or even support contracts.
(I use RW from time to time for some quick and easy companion websites or static stuff without big features - that’s what RW was built for and IMO works the best. I don’t want to setup a complete wordpress for a simple 5 pager where the content might change once every two years)
According to Mike, he’s shelving development while he works on other things. “It still works well and I am still supporting all current owners.” he said.
I know that at one stage he was looking at a substantial update to GoCMS. Like many others, I hope that’s the case.
I cannot and do not want to do everything myself and the RW universe is a small part of my work. But what you’re doing here is not provocative, it’s just completely wrong and quite arrogant, because you think we all just press publish and then cash in, and otherwise have no idea. You have no idea what I or others are doing and you have the very limited view that because we are asking questions here, we are just a bit simple.
Once again: my concern is the way of communication with customers and in this case it is obviously not only lacking in the addon developer mentioned here.
Why doesn’t Mike communicate this to his customers, but only through hidden channels? It’s no problem to say that. I’ve done things that I just had to stop doing at some point for various reasons. If I communicate this to my customers and also guarantee a deadline for support, then it may be a disappointment but it’s never a problem.
It’s just a clean and decent way to end things or put them on hold for all I care.
Threads like this are the reason you see many prominent developers jumping ship.
As @robbeattie already pointed out, I pulled Go CMS from my site to focus on other projects. I still fully support all previous customers of all my products.
It’s a good little on-page editor for content - text, photos - and some extra bits to add Google maps, Soundcloud tracks, Vimeo and YouTube videos, and also has a really nice blog layout with three styles.
Maybe my English is just too bad. I have not addressed your support page. But let’s leave that alone.
Strange that you of all people should say that. In Switzerland we say to this: “C’est le ton qui fait la musique”.
I’ve talked about the fact that I bought Yabdab’s products and I like them and that I don’t think it’s the fine way that the product has disappeared from the product portfolio without a word to me as customer.
If I like something, then I say so and gladly give a positive evaluation. If I don’t like something, I say so too. Some people can react quite normally, others obviously have difficulties.
So everyone reacts within the bounds of their possibilities.
I would like to thank everyone for the lively discussion.
While I have done some occasional finger pointing at a few developers, Mike’s products are pretty solid.
Ok, very solid.
They work, and here’s why: He gives pretty strong recommendations, parameters, actually mandates (no guarantees if your host is GoDaddy.com) (or something to that effect), and in that way he’s pretty honest, almost brutally honest, possibly Trumpian–which might not sit well with all.
I nearly bought GoCMS during the 2019 Black Friday sale. I think I actually had it in my cart and was about to proceed to checkout when I got seduced by some other RapidWeaver developer’s Black Friday sale.
Wish now I’d proceeded to YabDab’s checkout.
End users: quit yer whining. This whole www thing is pretty much a crapshoot anyway–in many ways. Nobody really knows what tomorrow is going to bring–even if you’re on your Mac wearing a mask and gloves and socially distanced from Windows 10.
Mike is working on something new or two or three or four–maybe for RW, maybe not; he’s a developer, and my guess is his sphere is not limited to just RW, but for whatever reason(s), he judiciously acknowledged that his greater opportunity lies with pulling GoCMS as opposed to keeping it for sale when he knew something down the road was going to impede on GoCMS performance, and he just couldn’t devote his limited resources to keeping it going in its current version.
Frankly, I’m impressed.
He’s honest; he’s principled, a rare quality in 2020.
I now trust Yabdab more.
If you were clever enough to buy GoCMS, it’s still supported–so go forth and prosper.
But no more crying. There’s no crying in baseball–or RapidWeaver.
