Getting more and more business contacts, how should I (we) handle those ?

I don’t know about other team members, but I have gotten more and more business contacts lately. By business contact I don’t mean people requesting my services or the team services. I mean business people wanting to know more about MODx, do business with it, ask about future development and all...

Let’s take an example: the last contact to date was from dcontact, who has PM’ed me to tell me he intended to launch a hosting service based on MODx, but was concerned about MODx not handling multilingual content natively (which he apparently desperately needs).

I answered that if he was patient enough, he’d get what he is wishing for with 1.0. I also dug a little about his business model, when he started asking if he could remove copyright notices and references to MODx (e.g no link back to MODx). Also asked me when 1.0 would be released, told me if it was too far away, he’d fork, pay developpers to implement it and have MODx customized to his needs and sell the application. That’s when I discovered he was pretty fuzzy with the GPL licence (and opensource community dynamics), and made some points quite clear to him (what he can and can’t do, how he can best contribute), inviting him to read the GPL also.

Anyway, he said if things could happen fast enough, he’d rather help the dev team speed up the process by :

- donating money to the project => Nice, but he seems to expect that donating will guarantee the release will happen sooner, which I don’t think we can guarantee. I don’t yet what amount he is thinking about (want me to investigate ?)

- contributing to 1.0 dev => I told him the access to the 1.0 code was strictly limited to the dev team right now, and he’d have to wait for a public release (I didn’t mention a possible "premium users" beta program, since I am not sure where we stand here).

What’s your take on this kind of contact ?

Firstly, he should probably contact the founders of the project, since that seems most appropriate. Let him fork all he wants, but he’ll be totally in the cold when the real 1.0 rolls out and I can assure you he’ll regret the decision as it’s simply going to be an incredible bit of code!

Secondly, funding will DEFINITELY get things pushed ahead faster. I’ve personally done this on numerous occasions in fact for certain key things. That’s part of the reason why MODx is at the point where it is today. With 0.9.5 there’s a good chance you’ll see some things as a direct result of this with XPDO’s MUCH earlier integration into MODx.

Without knowing anything of his or his team’s competency, I can’t say whether or not he’d be a good "team" player. The tone of his post certainly seems like it’s very much an entitlement philosophy and threatening in nature. Dollars sure make up for a lot of personality deficiencies though.

Quote from: rthrash at May 22, 2006, 08:52 AM

Firstly, he should probably contact the founders of the project, since that seems most appropriate.

Yeah well, I meant to do that of course, just wanted to discuss a bit before directing him to you especially since he started saying he contacted me because english was not his strong suit...

Quote from: rthrash

Let him fork all he wants, but he’ll be totally in the cold when the real 1.0 rolls out and I can assure you he’ll regret the decision as it’s simply going to be an incredible bit of code!

Yeah well, funny, that’s exactly what I told him
It seems to have worked, because he said he would go along with the community rather than going the separate way...

Quote from: rthrash

Secondly, funding will DEFINITELY get things pushed ahead faster. I’ve personally done this on numerous occasions in fact for certain key things. That’s part of the reason why MODx is at the point where it is today. With 0.9.5 there’s a good chance you’ll see some things as a direct result of this with XPDO’s MUCH earlier integration into MODx.

OK then, I’ll direct him towards you to discuss funding... I hope this comes through and help funding the project

Quote from: rthrash

Without knowing anything of his or his team’s competency, I can’t say whether or not he’d be a good "team" player. The tone of his post certainly seems like it’s very much an entitlement philosophy and threatening in nature. Dollars sure make up for a lot of personality deficiencies though.

Yeah well, it seems to me he has no team at this point.
He want to build a business based on MODx, is all I know...