.NET Reflector will be replaced

  Sadly today I heard about the demise of .NET Reflector.  Ok, it didn’t really die, but it might as well have.  With the announcement that RedGate is going to charge $35 for a ‘perpetual license’, the community has allowed itself to be the target of what amounts to extortion; we have no one but ourselves to blame.  For two and a half years we have all had that sneaking feeling that this day would come, yet we sat idle and did nothing to thwart this inevitablity. 

Perpetual Licensing  

 In an attempt at marketing spin, RedGate has announced there will be a ‘perpetual license’ for $35.  Ok so they are peddling a ‘perpertual license’, but what is that really ?  Here is a post by Gary Tillman from their forum:

"Perpetual licensing means that the version of Reflector you purchase
is yours to keep forever. You will also get any minor upgrades for free.
For example if you purchase version 7.0 for $35 you will get version
7.1,7.2,7.3.... for free but not version 8.0"

and a quote from Neil Davidson, the CEO:

"Version 7 will be sold as a perpetual license, with no time bomb or forced
updates."

    Ah, a ‘perpetual license’ is a license to software without any time-bombs and optional updates (for an unknown duration as it ends the second they decide to release a ‘major’ update).  WOW, novel concept there RedGate.  I think everyone still has a licensed copy of Windows 95 where Microsoft provided ‘free’ updates for however long they decided, and when they stopped support for that version, they no longer provided updates but the software continued to run in perpetuity; yup just a ‘regular old license’.  So, instead of just being clear and using terms everyone understands, they added the word ‘perpetual’ in some attempt to make us feel like the license is somehow different.   

Will it really only be $35 dollars ?

   When reading their FAQ about the recent changes, I couldn’t help but read the subtext of one particular Q/A:

Q: How can you make this work for $35? Are you going to come back a
year from now and raise the price?
A: We think there is a huge potential for Reflector that has not been
tapped and that we can make up for low pricing by volume sales. Could we be
wrong? Yes, certainly, but Red Gate has a good track record of offering tools
that deliver major benefits at low prices. 

Maybe I’m a simpleton, but what I read in-between those lines is that RedGate realized that the ‘whistles and bells’ they added to the ‘Pro’ version didn’t add enough value to convert the majority of the user-base to paying customers; the free version provided what developers needed which left RedGate with two options :

1. Add true, compelling value
2. ‘Force-convert’ their user-base to paying customers

They obviously chose option 2, and if the $35 fee doesn’t result in enough revenue I can’t help but believe that the cost will definitly increase.  Sorry RedGate – fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

A replacement WILL emerge

  I am forced to remind everyone of RedGates ‘commitment’ 2.5 years ago:

"Our commitment is to maintain an amazing free tool that will continue to
 benefit the community while seeking input from users on ways to make .NET
 Reflector even more valuable."

     To his credit, Lutz Roeder managed to create, support and extend .NET Reflector for more than eight years for FREE; RedGate couldn’t manage it for a mere 2.5 years.  I feel that the community has grown tired of RedGate’s level of ‘commitment’ to the community.  Something tells me that in the near future, an open-source/free-source version of a .NET Reflector will be appearing on the net driven by people who are truely commited to the community.

UPDATE

   So, it appears that the guys over at SharpDevelop have responded exactly as I had expected the community would; they have started work on ILSpy , an open-source .NET Assembly browser and decompiler.

Is .NET Reflector promoting EULA violation?

Recently while perusing the EULA for .NET Reflector I couldn’t get past the irony in the presence of the clause specifically prohibiting reverse engineering.  Somehow it’s ok to reverse engineer somebody elses code but NOT ok to reverse engineer Reflectors code… hmm that seems a bit of a double-standard.  While still grappling with how they could possibly justify this position, I begin to consider the newly touted ‘Pro’ feature of being able to step directly into third-party assemblies from within Visual Studio. 

As any .NET developer knows, the use of Reflector is pervasive within most large organizations.  So what I got wondering is, how will the legal departments of those organizations react when they find out that with a single key-stroke, a developer can inadvertantly be ‘reverse engineering’ a third-part library and thereby violating the EULA.  It would seem to me that Reflector Pro will be contributing to, if not causing, the violation of EULA’s everywhere.

How to disable .NET Reflector’s auto-update feature

At the request of Red-Gate I have removed the contents of this post.

See below for the comment where I was politely reminded that the ‘free’ version of .NET Reflector is, to use the Free Software Foundation definition, ‘free’ as in ‘free beer’, not as in ‘free speech’.

  And for those of you who are wondering if the auto-update and auto-delete feature(s) can be disabled, the answer is yes and fairly easily (as of version 6.6.0.30).  Of course with the introduction of the open-source ILSpy I have to ask who cares ?

Update 6/2/2011

  RedGate announced that v6.8 of .NET Reflector, without the expiration date, will be made available to ‘current users’.  This post by Neil David (RedGate CEO) attempts to explain the reasoning behind their previous abhorrent behavior.  However, while on the surface it might look and feel like an honest attempt to ‘make things right’ it still feels like little more than another attempted marketing spin.  Why ? well for one thing, they are NOT making any of the v6.x versions available for download.  Posts on their forum from annoyed users pretty much explain the situation. 

   Well fear not RedGate, the wonders of the Internet will help out your disenfranchised target market where you apparently willnotcannot.  A quick google search for Reflector.6.6.0.30.zip yields a copy persisted for all time (or you can submit a comment and I will email you a copy ~2.05 meg zip).  So to those of you who are looking to get your ‘free license’ but don’t have a copy of the zip lying around, download the zip, extract it, and run Reflector.exe.  Because the version is immediately ‘out of date’ you will see a very confusing dialog box on startup saying:

This is the last free version of .NET Reflector which will expire May 30.
Do you want to download a free 14 day trail of version 7 ?

Clicking ‘Yes’ will perform the update and finally allow you to enter an email address to create a license key.  All of the steps are spelled out in this post from a RedGate forum.

   For those who want to verify the contents of the zip before running anything.

1. Extract the contents of the zip into a temporary folder on your machine
2. Download the fciv.exe tool avilable from Microsoft
3. Verify the SHA1 hash of the extracted Reflector.exe before running it. 

Here is the SHA1 hash of Reflector.exe v 6.6.0.30

547e75ef960e5a6b7104df553f1b5401e9044f18

    The SHA1 hash above was generated using fciv.exe run against the Reflector.exe which I extracted from the original zip as downloaded from Redgate.com earlier this year(2/13/2011); good thing some of us are digital packrats.