It would be good to pay for the development of dude?

Should I add more poll questions?

Is there a list of requested features somewhere or a what are the requirements for new version of Dude?

The question I would add would be the level at which people wouldn't see the value paying for the dude?

Also should their be a free version?

How would payment work? per device count? per company? could staff then take it home and learn / use it at home?

At the moment we have our main dude setup but some larger clients have an instance in their site that we link into.

Also I have it setup at home for training and casual monitoring and a second small instance at work to monitor some tunnels.

I would be willing to pay (or more preferably contribute funding to the project to keep it free but aid development) but I feel that putting a paid model around it brings in loads of complexity that we don't want and introduces limitations.

The other option would be to make it an open source project that Mikrotik guys lead on however the engineering talent of this user group could be applied to the problem.

Regards
Alexander

Payment certainly introduces a whole other layer of complexity to the issue. Mikrotik do not seem to be interested in making a profit from The Dude, otherwise they would have been selling it for years. The problem we all see with it is the lack of development (at the rate we want). I think opening up the development and support of the product to volunteers under the leadership/guidance of Mikrotik could solve this issue. Mikrotik may not wish to open-source The Dude code (for whatever reason) but, I expect that a non-disclosure agreement could be put in place between the volunteers and Mikrotik to protect Mikrotik's intellectual property.

I think they should charge for The Dude.

This could be a good model

10 devices for free (will still let people trial it, and small deployments use it)
Over 10 devices USD$1 per device per year, purchased in packs of 10 devices

If Mikrotik have a reasonable pricing model, and had 500 customers each with say 100 devices, that is a further USD$50,000 they are making each year, probably enough to pay for a dedicated developer.


The main features I want to see are:

- Ability to schedule RouterOS updates in groups, e.g. upgrade these 10 routers at 3am this Sunday
- More "resolution" in the historical graphs, e.g. dont average it as time goes by, show the actual values
- Ability to log to an external database e.g. MySQL, PostgreSQL
- Ability to automate running of Traffic Generator tests, have defined profiles and schedules. This can be used with SLA funtion to ensure your network is delivering the service you have sold a client.
- Ability to create Service Level Agreements, and report/alert on these. This can be used to ensure that what you have sold a client is being delivered, and use for audit purposes

I think that model would need to scale - in our case as a pure MT network with many thousands of devices that may make it unrealistic (especially if you were to scale over 10, 50 or 100,000 devices).

Not to mention it needs to be kept in mind that we still need to provide the hardware to run it on, and at scale that can be quite expensive in its own right.

But overall i agree - i would pay if it were to ensure development, and support.

250$ license will do it fine I guess.
No need to complicate the licensing.

Dude is a great tool. Better than many commercial apps around.
I am sure people will pay for it.

why should we pay for the dude when we are all ready paying for the mikrotik hardware we use and people like ubnt software is free and it has maps in you can plot with
when people develop free software they must keep it updated or hand the project over to somebody else that can develop it and bring out new versions more than once a year
no use saying this is freeware and we only work in our spare time
not everybody using mikrotik hardware is a wisp charging for services what about the free wireless communities that use their hardware

Of course for better features and faster development I would be willing to pay!

Free for basic version but have a charge for pro version for users with less than say 100 Mikrotik devices and then free above, this way WISP's using large numbers of Mikrotik equipment are not penalised and remember Mikrotik they also purchase in volume so it would be important to keep these customers happy?

Signed up just to post this and vote.

We tried dozens of monitoring systems, from home grown scripts, to Cacti, OpenNMS, Spiceworks... you name it and have not found anything better than The Dude for handling our internal network and 50 remote sites.

We do not use any other Mikrotik products. I would happily pay for this software if it would speed up development. I understand The Dude is Mikrotik's side project, but to the people who use it and rely on it to keep a corporate network up and running, it is anything but.

Also signed up to post. We are now monitoring 794 devices in dude since we tried the program in 2008. We have been searching for something else to use in light of the silence but other than Nagios we deployed for server monitoring nothing else comes close to the ease of mapping, sorting, customizing that you have in Dude. I can support the 1$/device/year without a seconds thought if it means continued development.

Dude is very unique in how it compares to everything else we have tried; I think of it as a sandbox at times.

Hoping for Google maps/openstreetmap, infinite trending in a sql database etc, more custom fields, then my IT life would be complete.

Torban

yes the Dude is pretty amazing compared to other things. My engineer is complaining though that the backend is sql lite which limits our ability to use the program; and also something about how all the data is in binary when it gives data to sql server.

Hey Normis,

we don't hear anything from MT's side about "Paying for dude".

If you don't want to make a comercial dude: Make an OpenSource Dude. The comunity will do the rest ...

I really need a version of the DUDE that works ! and yes I am so willing to pay for the development of this great tool !!!!!

we'd also be willing to pay as long as its a general license fee (on a yearly basis?) and not a per monitored device basis.

Whatever you guys gonna do, do it fast we'll need this thing stable within the next 4 - 8 months.

I think they should charge for The Dude.

Why? At the moment, The Dude is a loss-leader for other MT products since it is so tightly integrated/bound. If you've got a The Dude installation, then surely you're more likely to buy MT products rather than a competitor's?

If there was a licence charge, we wouldn't be using it - we'd spend the money implementing a Nagios solution instead. This would give us more information and allow easy monitoring of devices The Dude doesn't cope well with (SIP, for example). I suspect that others would also move away to competing 'free' products. To be honest, a combination of Smokeping, Cacti and Nagios would provide most people with more information than they need.

That having been said, I would like MT to make an announcement regarding the future roadmap for The Dude. IPv6 support is missing for starters...

A payed version of The Dude or even some maintenance model implies professional support for The Dude. In my opinion, this poll is for letting everyone at MT know, we are willing to support The Dude - in every manner.

It has been more then one year and a half since the official release of v4.0beta3 and there have been no further improvements or bugfixes so far. If only those would be removed.

Another suggestion might be some fundraising, like user Neilson said, to push forward development.

Deleted because not related.

saw Dude as perfect advertisement tool among IT guys, not familar with network hardware at all and management.
and it handy, yes.
paid model can had enterprise-specific, heavvyweight features/caps.
but as stated above, doing/releasing/discussing two different version - redundant/costly for already quite busy engineers/developers.
IMO doing/taking it "as is"/"just for fun" better, but most customers will be happy to pay moderately/nominal price for Dude.
not voted, because im not use it on my ROS[yet], but considering to deploy on not-MikroTik[yet]network to test.