@Steven, you've been working on this project from quite a while, how do you maintain the "ownership", commitment interest of your developers?

Richard here.  We first off want to thank each and everyone of the participants from Twitter, you brought great quetions to PointStone and kept the chat alive. 

Steve was very gracious in answering our questions and we were thankful to him for providing such stellar and attentive responses. during SoftChat:

roughly 70 Tweets were made (Exactly 64 with the #SoftChat hashtag)

14 Retweets were given (PointStone gave good info)

It lasted for one hour exactly, and we handed out prizes for questions that were direct messaged to us.  Here are some of the RT's and interesting tidbits from PointStone:

SoftCity: Steve, we hear a lot about startup developers struggling to get started, how did @PointStone get its start? #SoftChat

PointStone: @SoftCity We actually never needed funding, we started small and decided to not request any type of funding #SoftChat

PointStone: @CatrionaHarris We started back in 1996, under a different name initially, but always working on computer optimization software #SoftChat

Pointstone: Our team consists of a tech support person, two developers and me, but we sub-contract work to external companies when needed. #SoftChat

CatrionaHarris: @Pointstone What advice would you give to new developers? #softchat

Pointstone: The most important thing to me is like what I'm doing, new developers should work on something they love #SoftChat

Pointstone: When we began developing System Cleaner, we focused on creating a feature packed but still easy to use software #SoftChat

marcantoineross: What do you think of Lean Software Development? #SoftChat

Pointstone: We tried to implement some Lean Software Development principles over the years, but only a small fraction were accomplished #SoftChat

SoftCity: We know end users can be picky, so when patching or updating your software, what is your biggest concern? #SoftChat

Pointstone: We try to update our software regularly, usually once a month, with new features and fixes suggested and found by users #SoftChat

Pointstone: Releasing a product on time is better than to keep adding features and pushing the release date further and further away. #SoftChat

Pointstone: New features can then be added as users request them or when the developer sees fit to add them #SoftChat

SoftCity: What are your thoughts on the increase of downloadable content? Will the retail sector become less important to software? #SoftChat

Pointstone: I believe the retail market will always exist, but as more people start using the internet for their daily purchases (1/2) #SoftChat

Pointstone: a greater percentage will purchase software online rather than via retail (2/2) #SoftChat

SoftCity: What does social commerce mean to you? What attracted you to #SoftCity as a marketplace? #SoftChat

Pointstone: Social commerce to me, means using social media to assist in online buying and selling of products and services. #SoftChat

SoftCity: What do you think is the biggest mistake amateur developers make during their first year of business? #SoftChat

Pointstone: The biggest mistake amateur developers can make is focusing more on the program features that on marketing the software. #SoftChat

Pointstone: You can have the best program in your class, but if no one knows about it you won’t succeed. #SoftChat

What did you find most interesting about #SoftChat?

We manage all feature requests via an open-source project management application called Redmine (http://www.redmine.org/). Depending on the number of requests for the same feature, we will bump features that get requested more often to the top of the list.

@Tim Voet, I maintain ownership of the software using a simple principle: I am the only one with access to the entire source-code of the software, so I am the only person who can compile the code into a running executable. Developers are given access to a small sub-set of the code to add/change any required feature.

As how I maintain commitment from our developers, I treat them with respect and don't impose too hard to accomplish deadlines.