The WiX installer is a byzantine incomprehensible mess. Its only appeal was that it was free. If I have to pay, I'd rather have a commercial product that is supported and easier to use.

Rob Mensching was supposed to monetize WiX by offering $5,000/yr enterprise consulting & support services. I guess that's not enough.

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robmensching 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Its only appeal was that it was free.

That was definitely its appeal to people who didn't want to pay anything for setup installation tools. But that definitely wasn't our only appeal or even our primary appeal. The WiX Toolset unlocked access to the Windows Installer in ways no other installation build tool does. If you didn't need that power then there were absolutely a lot of sharp edges and "missing features" to make your life easier. But if you had hard installation problems, those sharp edges were sometimes the weapons you needed to solve the problem.

> Rob Mensching was supposed to monetize WiX by offering $5,000/yr enterprise consulting & support services.

I don't monetize WiX for $5,000/yr. I monetize my team and my decades of experience building software installation packages of all shapes and sizes. With this "WiX Developer Direct" program from FireGiant (my company), you get monthly office hours directly with me to discuss whatever you want, you get SLAs for answers to tickets and guaranteed bug fixes so that your development team is never blocked. You also get an annual code review of your code by us and access to some high-end tools we develop. It is a high-touch offering and my customers dig it.

> I guess that's not enough.

That's not the case at all. The XZ Utils incident showed that Open Source sustainability is a huge problem and I was compelled to try to do something to address it. I don't think the Open Source Maintenance Fee is the only solution for sustainability, but I think it's a pretty good one for projects like mine. The WiX Toolset is the first project to adopt it because I need a real project to help work out all of kinks in the OSMF concept. Everything is working very, very well.

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Slartie 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

WiX basically lets you directly write the internal data structures used by Windows Installer to run the MSIs. Just in XML instead of some ancient binary database that is used in the MSI files to store things.

So the actual "byzantine incomprehensible mess" (which is indeed the correct description) is the MSI format and Windows Installer, not WiX.

	▲	robmensching 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I mentioned this in another response: > Our primary goal with the WiX Toolset was to provide access to the full power of the Windows Installer. Given the adoption by extremely large software projects, I think we've done pretty well toward that goal. We're slowly turning our attention to simplifying the toolset to make it easier to use for simpler projects. But that's only been a focus for the last couple of years, so not a lot has come about, yet. But the Files element is a huge upgrade. There is definitely more we can do to make simpler things simpler. :)