Why do you guys pay for Poker Tracker?

[CudjoeBill]

I say go for it; however, do it for the experience and make sure you realize what you are committing yourself to.

I have spent the last few weeks working on Poker Grapher, to update it to support PostgreSQL 8.2.x. No new features, just fixing what was broke. I actually use the graphing features built in to Poker Tracker, but I thought I could contribute to the community and some people where asking for it, so I decided to do it.

In the last few weeks I have played almost no poker. I have been debugging old code, writing new code, answering support requests, etc. I have had no time to play poker. And I've spent almost every evening after work, working on Poker Grapher. So TheIrishThug, Mark1978 and Dean all have a point. But, I am enjoying myself. And I think I'm helping some people out. So to me, it's worth it.

Now that said, if you are going to be writing code for other people, then please be prepared to help them out when they have issues. And they will. Some poker players are computer wizards, but most are not. Some can barely turn on their PC. All of them will need support. No two systems are the same and the fact that it works on your system doesn't help them at all. And there is nothing more annoying to all of us than someone that releases a program and then provides crappy support. Or worse yet, no support. So if you want people to trust you and use your software, then you better be prepared to support your program. PT Pat & PokerAce Josh have set a pretty high bar for all of us to live up to, when it comes to the support poker players are used to getting.

Open Source? Fantastic. I'm all for that. Poker Grapher was open-sourced by the original author VERN and it remains so today. So I encourage you to do the same with your software.

Speaking of Poker Grapher, feel free to incorporate anything you want from Poker Grapher (as long as you follow the BSD License). The source code is freely available for all to see & use. Use the link above to find the project on SourceForge.

Sorry for such a long response, but I felt you needed a little perspective. I hope you take this post in the spirit in which it was intended.

Good luck!