F.A.Q.

If you have any question not answered here, please feel free to ask us.

1. Our activity

1.1. Is this a site to sell your products?

More or less, yes. However, our plans with this site go further than just selling our products. It's a place for development of our open source projects too. A forum will come along soon too. There will be a section with “high-tech” articles for technology gurus. During our Web development experience (4 years now) we have learned a great deal of things; we just have to find the time to write about them.

1.2. Why not giving your products for free?

Actually the question that we received many times sounds like this: “you seem to be a great supporter of free software so why do you want to sell your products and don't just give them for free?”.

In order to fully understand us, you would have to be maintainer of at least one big open-source project. We do, currently, maintain quite some projects, that were built by ourselves. It is true that there were companies that sponsored development, but these were very few money (to make an idea, the total amount that we earned from custom work on HTMLArea can hardly buy a Macintosh). We have to make a living, which is why we have to keep a reasonable amount of software either closed or if open-source, commercial licensing would be required for commercial usage.

1.3. Why do you request donations?

First of all, we don't request donations. We accept donations. There's this subtle difference: nobody is required to donate something in order to use our open source products. But we'd like to encourage donations from people that can afford it.

By donating, you effectively give us time to work on the projects. If you want to read more on this, there's a section dedicated to donations in this FAQ.

1.4. Are you a Web design company?

Well, it depends on how you're seeing this term. By “web designer”, most people seem to understand “someone that works with Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia Flash”. By this definition, we are not a Web design company.

In order to develop a solid, portable and easy to use Web application, one needs to master several technologies and programming languages, for instance: HTTP, CGI, (X)HTML, CSS, XML, DOM, JavaScript, Perl, SQL. There are entire books on each one of these. In our opinion, Flash and images are not that important; information and the way you present it, these are things that matter. The business world is way too busy to enjoy Flash movies; I bet one would rather watch Al Pacino.

We develop Web-based applications, close in quality to desktop applications. Fast, portable, with easy to use, clean and sharp user interfaces. By our definition, we are “software engineers”.

2. Donations

This section may be of interest to you only if you are using one or more of our open source software products.

2.1. Why should I donate?

You're using high quality software. You did not pay anything for it because it's free. However, for us it's expensive (in terms of time) to develop and maintain it. By donating you effectively give us time to work on and improve the products that you are using. Even very small contributions matter—i.e. if you donate 10 bucks, your bugdet won't collapse. But if 100 people donated 10 bucks, the amount converts into new features for the projects that they use for free. You don't lose, we don't lose.

2.2. But you were payed by third parties...

Think of that as donations. They truly are so: people gave us money to implement certain, requested by them, features, and these features are now available for anyone to use. We copyrighted the code to ensure that it will be free forever. And we maintain the code, but maintenance is not payed by anyone—another reason to support us.

Also, for all contracted work that we had and was released for free, we worked at least 3 times the time that we were actually payed for. Otherwise we couldn't have provided such high quality products—another reason to support us.

2.3. Can I contribute code/feedback/fixes?

While we do encourage this, in order to provide high quality products we'd still have to check thoroughly what gets in and out, write documentation, make releases, etc. While feedback and bug fixes are always helpful, the core development still remains on our shoulders and we believe that no one could do a better job at this because we actually wrote it.

2.4. But I thought that you do it as a public service

We do! That's the funny part, we do. You don't think that donations that we receive cover all resources that we spend on the products, do you..

2.5. But 10 bucks are my monthly salary!

Well, in this case we urge you not to donate. You should donate only if you can afford it and if you feel to do so. Our projects are still free to use even if you don't donate.

3. Our company

3.1. What does “dynarch” stand for?

Dynarch stands for Dynamic Architectures. But does this matter anyway? ;-)

3.2. What's with the triangle?

The triangle logo doesn't really have a signification. Aside maybe for Mishoo: “It comes from a cartoon that I used to watch in my childhood. Unfortunately I forgot its name... Anyway, like in any cartoons, there were good guys and bad guys. The triangle was the sign of the bad guys. Because I started with programming when I was a little boy, I thought I'd need a logo and somehow, this one became a distinctive sign for me and for software that I wrote. And now it's the logo of my company.”

3.3. Your copy sucks.

Maybe, but at least we wrote it ourselves. We did not hire copywriters. But even though, we believe that it's pretty good: why would you hire somebody to write something about you? Wouldn't that be a “bit” of cheating? ;-)