Hi Nyall, Thank you for resuming this topic, I remember when I made a similar proposal some 10 years back and I felt like it was blasphemy in the church.
Perhaps now times are more mature and I am very much in favour of opening the official plugin space to various forms of paid plugins. In a previous life, I have had a very good experience and revenue by selling my PHP plugins on the Joomla marketplace (they maintained a plugin listing, integrated with the Joomla CMS admin panel, plugins were hosted elsewhere and they didn't manage the payments directly). All the plugins I was selling were GPL or AGPL, source code was publicly available on sourceforge/github and (to my surprise) I've never had anyone re-selling or publishing or offering downloads of my plugins in the wild. The Joomla marketplace was (I don't know if it still is nowaday) IMHO a great success story: there were many large/complex paid or freemium plugins with a flourishing ecosystem of small/middle software houses behind them, they typically also contributed to Joomla core development. So, my experience is that GPL is not a problem and people does understand that some developers have bills to pay and children to feed and they are generally happy to contribute to a sustainable software ecosystem. Cheers On Thu, Feb 1, 2024 at 2:28 AM Nyall Dawson via QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer@lists.osgeo.org> wrote: > > Hi lists! > > I wanted to kick start a (hopefully!) civil, THEORETICAL discussion about the > role of a paid plugin marketplace for QGIS plugins. > > This has been on my mind for a while, and recently was bumped by this email > to the list: > > On Fri, 19 Jan 2024 at 19:38, gam17--- via QGIS-Developer > <qgis-developer@lists.osgeo.org> wrote: > > > > Hi everyone, > > like many of you, I have developed and maintained a plugin for many > > years completely free of charge. > > I have never received any donation or compensation of any kind and now I > > would like to find a solution. > > Has anyone already found a way to receive donations? > > I was thinking of asking for a sponsor that would be displayed during > > execution, for example in the window titles or through a specific menu > > item like QGIS does (in this way the sponsor would be much less > > visible). > > So again, stressing that this is a THEORETICAL discussion, I'm interested in > hearing people's thoughts on the potential role of a paid plugin marketplace > for QGIS. > > Here's a bullet point dump of where I'm currently sitting: > > - Yes, I'm aware that plugins must be GPL, and that this makes paid plugins a > little trickier in that they're obviously still subject to the GPL. > - The GPL does NOT prevent charging for software, or mandate making it public > to non-paying customers. We could potentially have GPL plugins which are only > available to paid users, and only make these plugins available privately to > those users. YES, the GPL **DOES** mean that those paying customers can > redistribute the plugin publicly and freely without issue if they want (and > regardless of whether the original developer wants!) > - In fact, there's already likely thousands of private, paid for plugins out > there! I'm talking here of plugins made specifically for internal use by one > organisation only. Yep, that organisation COULD make the plugin public/freely > available, but in many cases they are specific to that one organisation's > needs or contain organisation sensitive logic/data. These plugins are > completely compliant with the GPL, despite being private and paid for by that > organisation. > - There's nothing preventing a public GPL QGIS plugin from depending on a > subscription based back-end, and offering zero value to anyone not paying for > that backend. And there's a growing number of these plugins, which depend on > users paying xxx large corporate entity regular high fees to access the > backend service. The GPL doesn't (and arguably shouldn't) prevent these large > entities from making money off QGIS plugins. > - But this means that the current situation is unfairly weighted toward these > large entities! A one-person team making an excellent plugin and providing an > awesome tool for use in QGIS has a MUCH MUCH harder time finding ANY > financial compensation for their efforts! I don't like this situation at all, > and I'd say it goes against the "spirit" of why QGIS was made under the GPL > in the first place. The big corporate entities win, the smaller community > focused developers lose out. 👎 > - Despite the fact that a paid user could freely re-distribute a paid-for > plugin, there's still potential financial gain for the developer in making a > plugin available for a charge on a theoretical QGIS plugin marketplace. > - The blender market is a great example of this. There's LOTS of GPL blender > add ons available there at charge. Eg > https://blendermarket.com/products/hard-ops--boxcutter-ultimate-bundle?num=2&src=top > as one example. If those numbers are accurate, that developer has sold >35k > copies of a GPL licensed add on at $39 each. I'm going to go out on a limb > here and guess that that developer's motivation to make their add-on > excellent is considerably higher than the developer of an equivalent QGIS > plugin 🤣 (not to mention that their time investment is much more > justifiable). And any ONE of those 35k paid users could have made the plugin > freely available for everyone else... but that hasn't stopped the sales. > > So what does everyone else think? Would there be a THEORETICAL place for a > THEORETICAL paid QGIS plugin marketplace somewhere in the future? Or is there > a better model we could (theoretically 🤪) follow to financially reward plugin > developers? > > Nyall > > > > > _______________________________________________ > QGIS-Developer mailing list > QGIS-Developer@lists.osgeo.org > List info: https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer > Unsubscribe: https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer -- Alessandro Pasotti QCooperative: www.qcooperative.net ItOpen: www.itopen.it _______________________________________________ QGIS-Developer mailing list QGIS-Developer@lists.osgeo.org List info: https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer Unsubscribe: https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer
