Discouraging Developers?!?

[voidinit]

I recently undertook a project to integrate our Point of Sale software with Intuit QuicBooks. My first thoughts were to make the .qbw file accessible via ODBC and connect my application to it via a JDBC-OBDC bridge. That was a crap idea to begin with. I found out that Intuit offers an SDK that gives developers the tools (as long as they are good little MS developers that just love COM and ActiveX) they need to connect to QuickBook's company files. This is all done via XML RPC. (Thank god for that anyway).

Well, to make a long story short Intuit provides the standard SDK package, a little bit of docs, and a forum for no charge. If you want more tools and good documentation you need to subscribe to their service. It's not cheap.

Is it just me or does that not sound like a god awful bad idea? I know they spent money developing this stuff, but why would any company discourage developers from writing conduits to integrate their application's with Intuit's?!? I would think the more applications my software can integrate with the more my software will sell. They give the SDK away for free, and the good docs are already written, whey charge developers to help your sales?

[hammer123]

In the proprietary world evelopers are companies from whom you can extract money because they need to be able to extend what you have given them. In the open-source world they are people who use the same software you use and you can extract money from them because their code makes it so you don't need to extend what you have given them.