that is the question
and, thank you for that, i just want some thought processes from the team, that’s all. its a pretty good software, and it’s getting better and more futures are added with every major release
@iuliancalin I think it’s great that gSender is free and I think it should be for people who have purchased a Sienci CNC. Whether or not it should be free for everyone is debatable. Providing gSender for free may encourage people to buy a Sienci CNC.
Ultimately, it may come down to licensing. I haven’t really read the licensing model they use, but since it’s a fork of another public domain sender, they may have to keep it free as well.
I’m not a lawyer but cncjs uses the MIT license which is a very permissive license that lets you do pretty much whatever you want except blame the original authors for any problems or damage caused by it. The pic is from GitHub.
I agree with your first paragraph. I know I’ve seen people on this forum that are only here because of gSender. Like you said maybe gSender is Sienci’s ambassador helping to spread the word and creating interest in the company as a whole.
It might also be hard to sell with so many free senders available.
i also think is great that is free, i also said thanks
and you do have a point on the company selling the machine and making software available for it , yeah that does make sense
I think free gsender is brilliant. I can remember when a new computer came pre-installed with windows software. Everyone had windows and is became a mainstay. I have been a Windows user ever since that first computer software. Good, Bad, Bad, and the Ugly.
There are many great free open source software packages. Many people aren’t aware of this. Just to name a few…
Libreoffice
Inkscape
Thunderbird
many browsers, Firefox/Chrome/etc/etc/etc
GIMP
Irfanview
Stellarium
VLC
Audacity
OBS Studio
And on and on…
I’m a big fan of the portable apps platform, go to portableapps.com and check it out. A great app that organizes a huge selection of free applications that you can run from anywhere, even a USB key without any installation at all. And a really nice menu system to arrange and find things. All for free.
This is sort of a deep topic, but there’s plenty of reasons to provide a free software sending option.
Generally, the company encourages open source - our mechanical designs are also open source and publicly available. The reasons are well documented but in short it lets the maker space push itself forward by iterating on designs.
The same thing sort of applies to the hobby space when it comes to senders - it really has pushed the maker space forward when it comes to sending software. To be honest, gSender had a number of features that we were the first to implement and make publicly available that are now implemented across a number of the sender options. Things like laser visualization, the probe touch verification, and even 1 click connection either had not been done or were not commonly implemented when gSender was first released but now has been adopted by a number of open-source sending options making the experience better for the average user, regardless of which software they use.
Secondly, there is benefit when it comes to support. When I first joined Sienci and gSender was not a thing, most users were using UGS or CNCjs - and if support had issues they had to direct the customer elsewhere. Having gSender be in-house means a more direct route to fixing or solving issues, and lowering the load support has to bear in the company.
Thirdly, it lets our engineers make things with direct software support, which is something not a lot of companies can say. With our engineering team, the software team, and the addition of Peter crossing the boundary between hardware and firmware, we really can develop new cnc accessories and machines that are “full-stack” across the controller, computer, and mechanics. An early example of this was the Vortex, where we added a toggle in the software to translate A to Y so it would work on grbl controllers. A more recent example is the ATC, which would not have nearly as good a user experience without the work we put in on the gSender side (see recent video with Johann and I). The accessory is entirely usable in any sender, but because we develop the software we can do things that other senders might be unwilling to implement - like the setup wizard, or direct messaging popups for user interaction requirements.
There really is a bit of “one for you and one for me” here - we can make gSender free because we can provide value for the company in other ways - so while things like some of the ATC functionality may not be useful for the average gSender user, it does provide value internally in lower support costs (ATC installation wizard, UX, SD/template uploads). And at the same time, we can add general features and improvements that benefit the average gSender user, like faster visualization, SD support, etc.
Fourth, as touched on, gSender can be a gateway into either our community or ecosystem - if people like the software, they might be more willing to check out the hardware as well. We do track downloads with daily snapshots and have opt-in usage metrics, and the average gSender release gets multiple times more downloads than the number of machines we’ve ever sold.
Anyways, this is getting a bit long but I want to say reiterate gSender is free because the company as a whole really does want to push the CNC space forward and community involvement and adoption is a part of that process. It will remain free into the future.
And we all really appreciate the positive words 
Thank you 
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