Red Gate Software has announced that it will begin charging a $35 fee for a perpetual license for its.NET Reflector software. Formerly available for free, .NET reflector is a very popular code browser and decompiler that is frequently included in lists of the top tools for .NET developers.
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The company’s Simon Galbraith said they had to begin charging for the tool in order to fund further development. “Further development of Reflection does not make commercial sense,” Galbraith said. “Reflector is a tool that has to stay current—has to work in all kinds of new ways, with mobile environments, with new versions of the .NET platform. We need to spend money on that, and at the moment, we can’t do so in a commercially justifiable way.”
A number of developers have heavily criticized the move and have called for Red Gate to open source the software.
