Telerik acquires Fiddler. A week in review.

I wanted to personally thank the entire Fiddler community for the overwhelming response to last week’s announcement that Telerik has acquired Fiddler. The feedback has been just amazing – in just a week Twitter has absolutely blown up and our survey asking for your input has already received more than 1400 responses (keep an eye out for a future post based on those responses)!

If it wasn’t obvious before just how important Fiddler is to the community, here a few or my personal favorites.  But don’t take my word for it, feel free to see the Tweets for yourself or read the comment strings on my original post.

-“Fiddler Web Debugger Joins Telerik. Long term, this looks like a win” @mikehostetler

-“Wow, where have I been? Fiddler is now part of @Telerik? Congrats to Eric Lawrence and all us developers too!” @spatacoli

-“Congratulations to @ericlaw! Fiddler will be in good hands over at @Telerik. You deserve it after nearly a decade of "side" work.” @Idisposable

-“Fiddler bought by Telerik. Cautiously optimistic, Fiddler is a great tool and Telerik seems to do right by the OS community #noredgate” @justinbigelow

-“One of my favorite developer tools is about to get pretty! #Fiddler #Telerik” @iamfruin

That said, even with the outpouring of positive feedback and support, there are a few naysayers who’ve expressed concern and even doubt that we won’t honor our commitment to keeping Fiddler the free tool that we all know and love or that we’ll bury it in our other tools.

-“Oh god. Telerik have just bought fiddler. Watch it turn into one big ad for their testing tools”

-“Can't wait for Telerik Fiddler Pro that is not free, or the free ad-supported Telerik Fiddler Community edition.”

-“there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. it is a bit sad to see corporate acquisitions of great freeware projects, nonetheless best of luck to Eric and Telerik

In my original blog post (knowing the lack of time and patience we all have for announcements) I tried to be brief and to the point. My apologies if that didn’t come clear enough. So, let me state for the record -- in bold, underlined and in red font so it is easily noticeable. 

Fiddler, similar to our other free tools – will remain FREE. 

Let me take just a moment to address some of the naysayers.  A majority of the negative comments revolve around the assumption that it is impossible for Telerik to keep Fiddler a free tool.  This assumption that we will be forced to monetize Fiddler is made with a limited view of what one company did with the free tool they acquired.  Let me pause for a second and address this directly.  We all know who the company in question is, and while I didn’t call it out in the original blog post, you called it out in comments and tweets. Redgate is a great company with great products, I have used them in the past and have always been impressed.  Did they make a mistake in the way they handled Reflector after promising to keeping it free?  In MY opinion, yes but it is always easy to play Monday morning quarterback and second guess their decision.  Ok now back to Telerik.  In my original blog post, I mentioned that Fiddler is the engine for our load and performance testing features of Test Studio.  Engine is the keyword in that sentence meaning that acquiring Fiddler was a technology and talent acquisition for Telerik.  We need to be able to quickly enhance this engine and what better way then have the creator as part of the team.  As we enhance and develop this engine for our paid product those updates will find their way into Fiddler for the benefit of the larger community.

As a developer and free tool contributor myself, I appreciate everyone who reads and comments on my blog, but what I appreciate more are those who actually contribute back to the community.  Although we know that we will never please everyone since we are a corporate entity, Telerik has and will continue to support the community in every way possible.

So, if it is unclear to anyone, Fiddler is not going commercial - it will continue to built upon and Eric will have the opportunity to do with it what he has always wanted - make it the best tool on the market.  I get excited when I think about how far Fiddler has come as a nights and weekends project for Eric and I can only imagine what we can do with it when he starts full time.