Commercially licensed addons.. point of view?

How should it work? You can’t provide this with package management imo. e.g. what would happen if I purchase on my test setup but want to use it in later-on-environment?
Think purchased addons should be offered separately on maybe another addon-provider (this currently only supports modx.com but is in development) where you can authenticate yourself etc.

Why not offering a service package (support) for your free addon? VisionCart - free to use but if you really want support, pay for these guys. As you mentioned, no one can do this without money but there are plenty options to pay for it. Mark said it before - why not via email? why not via a contract?

Quote from: smooth-graphics at Feb 28, 2011, 12:26 PM

How should it work? You can’t provide this with package management imo. e.g. what would happen if I purchase on my test setup but want to use it in later-on-environment?
Think purchased addons should be offered separately on maybe another addon-provider (this currently only supports modx.com but is in development) where you can authenticate yourself etc.

If you got a license code then it would apply to a test and live environment. It’s not too far from desktop commercial software. If I need a plugin on 5 sites then I purchase 5 licenses. Once I’m done testing and move it to the live site then I’m still only using 1 license.

Quote from: smooth-graphics at Feb 28, 2011, 12:26 PM

Why not offering a service package (support) for your free addon? VisionCart - free to use but if you really want support, pay for these guys. As you mentioned, no one can do this without money but there are plenty options to pay for it. Mark said it before - why not via email? why not via a contract?

The point is that something more stable needs to be in place. Sure I can donate to a plugin but what happens if in a 3 month span no donations or contributions come in? The progress comes to a halt. The idea is to encourage the great devs out there to get down to work providing excellent, ongoing, supported plugins. Most people will find it easier to simply by a license (even annual) and keep the dev going.

There’s a difference between commercial support and releasing commercial addons.

The difference is that with the first one, you’ve already spent loads of unpaid hours on something, before people start using it, and some will pay you for helping them installing it, modifying it for specific needs etc. The latter one would allow a developer to get paid for the development - small amounts maybe, but definitely something more than hours dedicated to debugging for a specific set up. And that’s a big difference

I know but what I’m afraid of are some commercial addons (on other CMS) which costs hundreds of dollars and what you get is a crappy, buggy code snippet. There’s no(!) reason why commercial addons should be better than free. Mostly I think they’re poor because no one has reviewed the code.

That’s the reason why I personally prefer the crowdfunding:
- get paid if some money arrived (limit should be reasonable)
- else you don’t have to develop it
- everyone can spend as much money as he actually has and will pay
- a user can pay for additional things later (new features, support)

@scottishbullet: More stable is not an issue on modx revo I think. I actually don’t have any addon which is really unstable and doesn’t have a alternative stable one. Progress stops even on commercial plugins - I’ve seen enough addons that aren’t developed further on. At least by luck you get some bugfixes.
If it’s on github there are new users coming all the time. See html5boilerplate as an example - there are so many contributors and it’s getting better all the time.

I think addons that are personally developed with passion are the real good ones. There’s nothing worse than a bad paid job. And this becomes true if you offer a commercial product and it doesn’t sell as you expect. This is likely to happen for MODX as the community is very small… with crowdfunding you only get the wealth donations as a extra for your hard work!

Riffing here, as I think the idea of buying (or selling) a one-off add-on is problematic (how on earth do you control usage/quality?), but how about a subscription-based MODx package provider (with a user/key combo), with devs getting either a per user, or per download fee. It could work a little app-store-like - MODx core team control quality and admin, take a cut for doing so, devs get exposure and simpler management.

For all I know this could be what’s planned anyway, but it seems to be easily ’developable’ - pun intended.

To respond to someone else, I know that tip-buckets/bounties have always been used, but I’m thinking more of a concerted programme of crowdfunding. I envisage a system where devs auction work (ie - I’ll build X when bids match $200), and I can bid (add ’votes’) at, say $1 a go, as an individual. It wouldn’t take a lot of sponsors to get things moving on several fronts (and persuade other devs to learn the core). Or, we could do it en masse as a community - like the awesome http://www.quirky.com - post idea, crowdsource specification, devs pitch costs, crowd raise money. Essentially, it’s just formalising what goes on here already.

From a learning perspective, commercial add-on’s can be a distraction, the noise surrounding them and the subsequent releases and re-releases, can sometimes drown out the native product

They may just be a godsend for a developer’s in the marketplace.

Pro’s and con’s just my 2 cents, other similar CMS offeering are good examples of add-on’s that seem to take over the original product dnn’t cha know.

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. Any significant add-on is going to take *many* hours to develop -- at least five to ten times what most people would think -- and another crapload of hours to support. People are understandably reluctant to pledge any significant amount of funding for an add-on that doesn’t exist yet and may or may not meet their needs or operate reliably. $200 dollars is a fairly trivial amount for a significant add-on, and for many MODx add-ons, that amount wouldn’t influence the developer one way or the other. Most of us tend to develop things either because people need them, or we need them, or we think they would be fun to develop.

My general attitude is that charging for an add-on wouldn’t bring in enough money to offset having to deal with angry customers who paid for it but can’t get it to work for one reason or another. At least now I can just chuckle at the emails I get from users of my add-ons saying, "I’ve rewritten the code of your extra and now it doesn’t work. Would you mind logging in to my site and fixing it for free?"

If some commercial extras are very successful, my attitude might change, but I’m not holding my breath. Does anyone else remember how we were all going to get rich with shareware?

To add my 2¢:

I personally would be very skeptical to pay for anything. If you go on Joomla for example (I started developing CMS’s with Joomla - only took one site to start hunting for something better!), you find 17 different add-ons that do the same thing. Some are commercial, some are freeware, and some cost a lot, and some are priced inexpensively. However, you NEVER know what quality code you are getting, if it will be an easy or a hard install and configuration (with Joomla its always hard ;P) and it can be scary having some dev team expecting you to fork over X amount of money when maybe that other dev team did a better job.

If commercial add-ons is going to be integrated, at least do everyone 2 favors (mentioned before I’m just 1 upping them):

1. MODX core team, rigorously test for Quality Assurance and to make sure the code is clean, semantic and [almost] bug-free.
2. Keep the choices down to a minimum.

Like said above, take some pointers from the App store. pull a % off each transaction to make it worth your while (although it still may not be worth your while) and keep the dev team on top of their product.

When add-ons are free, if it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work - at most some time is gone. But if they are commercial, time is gone, a refund is wanted, and frustration about spending money on something that is supposed to work that isn’t is very high. Quality control for commercial add-ons is a must, IMHO; but that may make it non-cost-effective.

Quote from: goonz at Mar 01, 2011, 12:50 AM

1. MODX core team, rigorously test for Quality Assurance and to make sure the code is clean, semantic and [almost] bug-free.

This is quite a big job and the commercial developer(s) would probably have to be willing to pay the MODx team either up-front $ or a percentage of the income for "certifying" the add-on. It might just work. People would probably be more willing to pay for a "certified" extra.

If dev team must approve it like in the apple app store they charge 30% of your dev’s charge. If there are 10 commercial plugins which cost maybe 200$ the dev team gets 0$ if nothing is sold even they reviewed it and get nothing if they don’t accept the plugin, too. If the plugin is sold, they get 60$ per plugin purchase. That’s nothing. I don’t think you can take the app store idea for such a "small" community.

And I’m totally conform with BobRay (the post of him before) and goonz (not the app store model).
I can see the point of getting money out of a plugin but as BobRay said: If it’s not purchased really often, you don’t get money out of it. If it’s purchased often, you need to offer rock-solid code, updates (small - free), support (even if you don’t like to). If you do not, you’ll really get into trouble. And as one mentioned VisionCart before, they have to give liability for the technical background. If some order doesn’t work for a big shopping site they’re liable. Now they’re not as it’s not-commercial.