sharing addins with other EA users

[OilyRag]

Hi,
as a new user to EA, I have been trawling thru' the forums gathering as much info I can on what EA users have been doing with respect to add-ins and so on.

I often come across old posts where the writer mentions they created an add-in. The number of add-ins worldwide must be quite extensive by now.

However, I find it hard to find any evidence that these add-ins are being shared in the EA community. I am aware of the EA Wiki page, and that does list several add-ins, but it   doesn't even reach into double figures. I often see posts where someone mentions an add-in they have created, and another poster then replies "can you share that with us" but  then nothing seemed to happen in response.

So, what's going on here?

Is it the case that many (most?) add-ins are created on work-time and so belong to the company for whom the developer works, and therefore free sharing of the add-in (+source code) becomes problematic?

Or do add-in developers feel their add-in is too specific in application and not worthy of being shared?

Or, are people keeping their work close to their chests in the hope that one day they might be able to sell the add-in, as happened with the Screen Architect add-in, or so it seems?

I think that if some higher degree of altruism was adopted by users and the companies they worked for on this matter, the entire EA community would reap a benefit. Even EA itself would or might gain deeper market penetration. The tool itself would benefit from having more users, more market share.

Do any of you have your own thoughts on this matter?

Before signing off, I would especially like to thank people like (for example) Matt Adamson for sharing his web modeller add-in on sourceforge. We need more of this kind of thing. Just reading his source code helped me out a lot.

I am developing an add-in myself for Word document generation, using the EA and Word Interoperability interfaces. I got frustrated with the RTF template editor way of doing things after just 2 weeks.

I for one will put some pressure on my manager at work to allow at least some of the automation work I do to be shared, if it ever gets to a point of suitable maturity.

[Uffe]

Hey there Oily,


Mine is possibly one of those Add-Ins you've seen created but not posted. Since it is for DDS and Sparx have a product in this area I can't release it to the general population.

Personally, I see it not as a competing product but as a set of bug fixes and added features, and it is my sincere hope that we can simply send it back to Sparx and have it included in future versions of the official product.

However, the matter has been taken a tier or two up in my organisation and is largely out of my hands. Will keep the community posted, but I will definitely not be able to release it myself, the only way forward is to send it to Sparx.

In general, I am of the opinion that the more free stuff is out there the better. These are productivity tools after all, and as such have no value on a consumer market but only as tools to build other products. On the other hand, companies have a perfectly reasonable expectation to reap financial benefits for things done using the company's resources. There's plenty of money in b2b.

The thing with EA as a platform is: it's cheap. It's not only the best (IMHO) UML modeller on the market, it's very low-cost. This means that although an Add-In is EA-specific, and although a company may not normally use EA, if they're interested in a particular Add-In the platform cost is not prohibitive.

This in turn opens up a niche market for companies who are not normally in the modelling business to build an Add-In and make some money off it on the side. Then again, a company in a particular market segment may well say "hey, good job, we're more productive with the shiny new Add-In you created, but let's not sell it to our competitors shall we?"

End of the day, it comes down to the policies at the company involved.