How to sell your libraries?

Question

If someone has created something like a DevExpress library, or Infragistics, Telerik, RavenDb etc., what's the easiest way to start selling it?

What are the required steps? Is there some rules for licenses and stuff?

Answer 1

Whenever you sell a library, a software product, food, clothes or whatsoever, you have to:

• Make a commercial version of a product, which includes shipment, support, etc.,
• Ensure that the product follows the standards and regulations,
• Protect your product against counterfeiting (and unpaid usage for software & libraries),
• Market it.

A library is not very different here. You have to:

• Make it commercial-grade. If your library crashes once per minute, well, chances are nobody will use it and you'll have to refund lots of angry people who optionally will sue you. If your library lacks documentation and sample code, few people will even start using it. Ensure that the library is done correctly, the code was reviewed by an experienced developer, the bugs were solved, the library was tested on different platforms with different permission restrictions, etc. Be ready to provide fast support, a platform for bug reports, listen to the feedback, etc.
• Ensure that style guidelines of the language are matched. When I use a freeware .NET Framework library and it has its own style rules, it's ok, after all, it's free and nobody can be forced to make something correctly when not being paid for. If, on the other hand, I paid my money, I expect the library to match all the default StyleCop rules.
• Is the library signed? How can you be sure that every customer will actually pay you, instead of downloading it through P2P and use for free?
• Make a high-quality website which presents your library properly. Talk about it (except on SE websites, thank you). Buy advertisement (real one, like in MSDN Magazine), etc.