A point that hasn't been mentioned. A company enters into an agreement to sell AMX or Crestron or whatever control product. I think you do so knowing the complexity of what your getting yourself into and the time and effort that will be required to be a good dealer of the products. Creating "code" or modules is all part of that. The reason you create these is to hopefully have something you can sell over and over again, thus making future projects easier to set up. I don't know too many companies that start to charge less for the programming of systems. As Alan stated, all the time and effort gets paid off over many projects. Yet to the client they are still paying a conciderable amount to have their system "programmed". I am sure a large portion of the bill is for actual used time, and hopefully another part is for the modules. All the talk about Dell or MS doesn't apply here. These are not people going to BB and paying 129.00 for the latest version of MS anything. If something did go wrong with their software, it's cheap, they can go out and buy another copy just about anywhere and be back up and running. In our case they were "sold" a bunch of stuff to be their control system. They were "sold" a bunch of ideas of what the control system can and will do for them, based on what your programmer is capable of. What I am sure many were not "sold" was the idea that if something goes wrong or needs changing in the future, it cannot be done by any other dealer than you because no one else would be able to access the "code". I appreciate that a lot of time and effort goes into creating working systems, but as a Creston or other programmer you are not creating something that no one else in the world could not have come up with. Your not painting the next Mona Lisa, your making stuff work, based on what was sold to the client. You didn't create the Creston or other programming enviroment, it was supplied to you as a dealer, and you are manipulating it based on the system to be controlled. The control of a piece of equipment in your system isn't going to be different from someone else. The Play function for brand X DVD player is the Play function and either the IR or RS232 command will be the same in your system as it will in someone elses. If you have to write a module for something that has never been controlled before, maybe your company should have thought about that before selling it, or if it was a request by the client, let him know that it needs a custom module and will cost $1000's to build. Personnally I think Crestron and AMX should register clients and the dealers supply the needed code to them. This way clients have a safeguard against dealers going out of business.
