I understand your principles and again sorry as I mistakenly thought you had deleted my post. Feel free to edit the comment as well.
And I do fully support the GPL/community and even give a discount to my http://uglyrobot.com clients who allow me to publish their custom developed plugins for the community.
@Mike, thought my post was deleted. Just edited. Sorry Andy!
FYI – I really respect all the work you put into BP Andy and others. I submit patches whenever I find something. I can’t speak for WPMU DEV but our members are very happy to have the instant support we provide and always updated plugins/themes.
People who are trying to put together a professional site see the worth in paying a relatively small fee (compared to hiring a private dev) to get support and plugins they can depend on not to break with each WP/BP update. Professional work costs money, and people who want it know that. Nothing wrong with giving people that options.
People should be able to choose what’s best for their needs/price. Many network creators will want professional hand holding for their migration. It ok to let them hire a developer for lots of cash instead of pooling their money with others in the same boat to get excellent support for low cost?
I started the WPMUDEV plugin 3 months ago, but we delayed it as we wanted to wait for Ning to provide a full export. When we saw the Ning announcement they asked me to push it out asap, and that was before Boone released his. There is no shared code.
I think it is completely fair to give users a choice of what features they want to have. 60% of my dev time was spent on the plugin supporting large member lists without timeing out and scaraping Avatars from Ning to import into BuddyPress. And considering what it cost Incsub to hire me to develop it $79 is more than fair when you get access to support and 8 premium BP themes along with 100+ other premium plugins.
I worked nonstop this weekend to finish up our own advanced importer we started a few months back. Allows you to do a full import of a Ning network’s users, their custom profile fields, and avatars to BuddyPress! It reallywas a bit of work to scrape avatars from the profile pages but looks real cool while importing. Full support for very large member lists via optional FTP upload and batch processing so it won’t timeout on you.
