Just curious...

How do you find time to develop this great product and giving al the support at the forum? By the looks of things, ActiveWidgets must be a day job and it doesn't pay you anything or maybe with the commercial license.

Just curious and don't need to answer.

Difficult question...

Probably the simple answer is this - I believe the project has chances for commercial success, so it is worth trying.

The commercial is HORRIBLE...it is a terrible message to send the target audience...

Apparently you haven't read the current license agreement. You are using a free version that you downloaded and you obviously love it. Well so do I and I have plans to eventually use it in our commercial application and I have no problem paying for that ability. I wrote my own grid and it works well for what it does, but Alex and the rest of the community have created a much nicer grid then I did and I feel that if I am going to use it to make money then I should share the wealth with the person that made it possible. (nice work Alex!)
I could be wrong, but there will always be a free version for non-commercial use. I think you are worried about nothing.

Jim Hunter
(I have no problem signing my posts)

I was asked by my manager to look for some dhtml grid. I suggested this grid in the very beginning but he did not want any open source kinda stuff. I tried to explain him the dual license but he was inclined towards pure commercial product and started searching for any pure commercial grid. We couldn’t find anything better - ‘simple yet powerful’. Being GPL, gave us better chance to understand the grid framework and appreciate it. Few vendors were not ready to give demo version. Few vendors had encoded versions which will only run on IE (huh). At last I was able to convince my manager for this Grid and changed his attitude towards ‘open source’ products.

Our project has suffered a bit because there was no ‘Priority Support’ kind of thing. In my opinion, this is highly desired for a successful commercial product.

‘Support Forum’ requires lots of improvements. Right now, one has to keep refreshing the support page to check if someone replied to his/her question. Also one can’t edit his/her posts. Check http://thej2ee.com/x2/modules/newbb/viewforum.php?forum=4 , it has everything except code highlighting.

(I too have no problem signing my posts)