Commercially licensed addons.. point of view?

(http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,61658.0.html inspired me to asking this question. Doesn’t mean I want to release that when developed commercially, but more that I’m considering options to fund development atm)

How do you guys think about commercial addons?

I’m thinking along the lines of buying licenses to use addons.. Would you consider paying for certain addons (and under what conditions?) Would it even be acceptable within this truly amazing community to ask for payment for a certain functionality? What about the type of license, would it be a single use case, or unlimited?

I remember a shopping cart being developed and sold a while back for Evolution. That topic seemed to be getting quite some critism on the simple fact it was being sold. (To be complete; it was a revised version of an earlier available addon which was now being sold)

Some Twitter responses:

I think it’s a good idea for this to happen
_egrouse


I’m ok with it if it inspires more & better addons. Concern: will it devalue the open ones so less ppl want to dev/use them
sepiariver

I think this is an important issues because I personally would like to drop building websites and focus more on CMP’s.

Yeah - I also believe it’s important to discuss in some way.

This is an open source project, and I really like how it’s organized right now, but some amazing stuff that is being worked on gets delayed because there needs to be money brought home at the end of the day...

We’ve said from pretty much day one that we hope a thriving premium Add-on ecosystem would emerge. We may just make it easier to accomplish in the future, too.

One of the things on the Partner Program page made me wonder if it would be realistic to expect private providers to be used more often for these premium / licensed addons.

Sounds very doable to secure your addons provider with a per-client code which is enabled after checking out.


It’s very nice to know the core team supports premium addons. I also wonder how the end-user / community members feel though.. after all, they’re the ones who should be making use of that, too.

In my mind commercial addons for a open-source system are critical.
As you’ve already said it could be worse for other addons but I think it makes the commercial plugins worse. Why should I pay for a addon which is not available in my language? Otherwise, I’d translate it in my needed languages but why should I give the code (translations) back to the developers as I’m acctually paying for that and don’t get anything from them? This could be applied to functionality, too.

What about the whole social coding thing that works so perfectly here in MODX community? I mean, sure I get money for my site I develop with MODX and Addons but even as I’m not a coder which means I can’t develop addons I try to make things better by providing translations, UI/UX improvements or other things. I personally wouldn’t do that for commercial addons if I didn’t get fully(!) paid for that. And trust me when I say you’ll not get much money out of the commercial plugins so you wouldn’t be able to pay off external people.

Another thing? What do you actually expect in money from a commercial plugin like a mobile manager? Think you wouldn’t sell much more than 200 licences in 2 years (rather less). If one licence is sold by 50$ which is a fair wage for that you’ll earn 10.000$ which seems to be lot of money. But be sure it’s lot of work to develop it. And be sure you have to provide support for your product which means you’ll get into trouble if anything doesn’t work, you’ll have to help people if anything is not okay with your product, you are liable for that, and you must maintain the addon, improve it and all for your own.
A non-commercial Addon means you develop with others a addon which can be maintained or improved by anyone and you’ll always get the credits. The other side is I can look into your coding behavior and for me it’s important to know developers who make good addons. Then, if I need one, I’d contact him for a commercial inquiry. Sothat’s the way to make money out of a free addon.

Just my thoughts…

edit:
So finally I always prefer to use a social-coded addon instead of commercial ones. I trust more in open-code than in closed-source where money is the main aspect for developing.

I have no strong feelings one way or the other. The fact that Akismet charges some users doesn’t affect my attitude towards WordPress.

It would require some infrastructure for commercial extras to be successful, though, and I think it would make a huge difference whether it’s supported via the Extras repository. I imagine that there are corporate environments where the execs would prefer a licensed, expensive addon over a free one that does the same thing.

The difficulty with commercial add-ons will be the same as for the MODx ecosystem as a whole. Someone has to go first, and people are generally reluctant to try things (that they will pay for) unless they can see results first - so you end up with a bit of a chicken-and-egg demand-and-supply situation.

Commercial developers will get hammered, support-wise, as I’ve yet to see any add-on released (for Revo, at least) that the great unwashed can implement as a no-brainer - the platform is too fluid, too abstract, too many undocumented features, environments too disparate. I simply don’t think it’s worth it (literally) for anyone who ’gets it’ to develop products rather than services - support, training etc.

I do think there’s a future for the kickstarter/bootstrap approach for specific add-ons, like the Visioncart guys did. I’d be much more comfortable paying a small monthly fee to non-core people like Bruno17 (for dev) and BobRay (for support) than a one-off for a specific thing. Perhaps some kind of ’follow-me’ ’tax’ on Git would work better, for the FOSS community. Or being able to incentivise the core team (hell, anyone) to fix specific things on Github, for example.

I think you will also see a drop-off of ’social’ support for folks using premium add-ons.

There may be a small niche for whole-site/theme developers, but I would have thought most folks looking to buy those would be in the WP camp anyway.

It’s Monday. I’ve got to wrestle with extension_packages. See you on the other side.

Commercial addons? Excellent idea. I wouldn’t mind paying a lot of dollars for something I’ve been looking for for ages.

For example: I’ve been looking for a TV-Explorer like addon for Revolution for quite some time now. I’d gladly pay for something like that. The same goes for payment and shipping modules for VisionCart. As long as all the addons are well tested and stable: it’s all fine by me.