A long time ago, in a country far far away … I created an ASP.NET control, that now lives in the dungeons of my hard drive. It’s a fairly well tested and stable control, that fulfills a very specialized task. I’d like to do something with this control, and I can already think of these:
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Commercialize it. Making a profit is always good, but since I don’t have a company, and don’t want to create one for this small purpose, how can I do this legally without too much overhead? Is there a marketplace, or an “eBay” for ASP.NET controls? It will also take some more work to make it ready for this, as I’d have to write some more documentation, possibly create a trial version, and optionally incorporate licensing and obfuscate the control.
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Open source it. Contribute the code to the world. Given the specific niche that the control fulfills, I don’t expect any contributions from peers, though. And yes, there are still many ways to evolve the control.
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Give it away for free. This way, I could perhaps attract the intangibles of peer recognition and reputation, which is always a good thing. What’s the most visible place to post it?
What would you do?
UPDATE:
A couple of components marketplaces have appeared. I know of binpress and codecanyon.
My control is a barcode control (one for ASP.NET and one for Windows Forms) that I’ve put on google code.
If you’d like to open source it a great place would be http://www.CodePlex.com, there you could post your project, the source code and accept community contributions….
Also I believe that CodePlex has a system in place where you could get revenue generated from ads that get displayed in your project workspace…