Then the question at this point is are you willing to take the risk and walk away and at what level is your confidence at in your ability to market and finish the code you currently have. You own the copyright to anything you make unless you explicitly give that right to them. I don't know what terms you signed with them however, sounds like you still retain the copyright. So I would try to negotiate them to an agreement where they can "own" the code to make whatever changes they would like (at the "own" price that they gave you), but with the caveat that they can not resell said code or offer a competing product into the marketplace. If they aren't being duplicitous this should be acceptable. If they are, well then at least you have your answer and you can base where you want to go from there (as in asking for a higher price based on potential revenues, etc). Just to give you a baseline, I've been in cases where the situation was similar and the work for building something specialized for resale was valued at $150-200 an hour (consultant hours). Just keep in mind though I have no idea what you are building and who the company is.
I wouldn't sell it to them outright. Potentially they have done due diligence on selling your software and have decided to buy the software from you and sell it themselves. If you are willing to take the risk, push them to license the software from you as a framework. Take a look at the models that ATG (now oracle), and sword-ciboodle crm have. They are established enterprise models where the framework is licensed to a company and the company is free to make changes of their own (but not resell). When you put in future updates you can sell them new licenses for the later versions.
i like the idea.I've thought about doing something like this before and wish every place would take credit card for rent. It would be great to be able to get credit card points for my largest monthly expense and also not have to worry about cutting a check every month. Its a great product from the tenants perspective.
There was an article on here recently about how in general the more agressive the lawyer is, the less case they have. Potentially the lawyer is bluffing. It a tragedy, that you have to shut down. This sort of thing makes me wonder if there is a market for a decentralized webserver. Sort of a bittorrent but for web pages that would allow you to get around some of the patent claims--in a way. The profit value of this would be that as traffic increased on site the added users would handle some of the load. Essentially auto scaling without the added hardware costs. Potential issues to get over is how to get the browsers to support such a thing. Could websockets or even existing JSONP work through it?
yeah, it would seem to me that with amazons patent reservoir and others reservoirs that creating a marketplace and a way to pull in that ability legally into your app would be a natural.
Respectfully I disagree. I think facebook did the right thing by walking away from email in its current form. I think subjects in messages are no longer needed and just because there are mismatches between the different systems, doesnt mean an attempt should be made to unify them.
Just looking at this long term, one can see that facebook will likely try to push their interface as a standard communications interface to everyone that you want to reach (business or otherwise) and ultimately let users choose how they can be contacted. This has far reaching implications for a product trying to reach their customers. Maybe they will even break this out into a paid product for businesses to reach their customers, who knows. Theres alot that can be done with a system like this. And im surprised it took so long for someone to do it. I believe the market has been begging for something like this for a while.
also you should look see if you can get the .com as well. There has been at least one case of libya taking a domain away from the owner because of content they disapproved of.
