Martin Rothschink from Home Server Blog has released version 1.0 of his Lights-Out Add-in. Lights-Out is a Wake-on-LAN and power management Add-in for Windows Home Server, and has been extremely popular. Martin also performed the German localization of Disk Management for us.
The new Lights-Out 1.0 UI looks slick, and there are a number of new features:
- Support for non WHS clients like Macs, Xbox, streaming clients
- Support for process, file, CPU and network load monitoring
- Scheduled wake-up, backups and a client option to shut down after backup
- Localized for English, German, French, Spanish and Chinese
The most interesting part, for me, is this section at the bottom of the page:
License
Lights-Out is available in 2 editions:
- a free community edition
- a licensed edition
After installation you can evaluate Lights-Out for a period of 30 days. After evaluation you need either a license to get access to all features or be satisfied with the community edition.
A license can be ordered from within Lights-Out.
Personal license €15.00 + VAT (approx. $23.90)
Commercial license €25.00 + VAT (approx. $39.90)
A license includes all updates for the 1.x range (from 1.0.x to 1.9.9).
…
I’ve put many hours of development into LightsOut. If you’re satisfied and save energy, I ask for a contribution by paying for a license to support the future development of LightsOut. Thanks!
I whole-heartedly support Martin in this – at some point (given that most of us have day jobs), the code needs to start making a contribution to the family grocery budget or it’s not going to get updated very often. I’m very glad to see that Martin decided to keep going with Lights-Out in this way.
The comments I’ve seen about the addition of a paid version have all been positive. The free version has all the features of the previous releases, and the licensed addition has added functionality that I’ve seen a number of requests for.
I look forward to hearing from Martin how successful this model is. The more high-quality Add-ins we have in the community, the better the overall Windows Home Server user experience will become.