David Hobson recently contacted me as he is doing research info business/financial models and motivation for Open Source projects. He sent me some questions that I answered; we thought that the answers might be interesting to the general community as well. David indicated it will be a little while before he finishes his research and encouraged me to go ahead and post the replies I’d sent him. I will, of course, post a link to his work when it is available.
Here are his questions and my replies.
What has been the motivation to churn out GPL plugins as well as support them? Branding is a benefit, both publicity and example of quality. However, I’m sure that doesn’t compare to the cost they require and you have plenty of branding and publicity already.
That is a complicated question, and one whose answer has changed over time.
When I first started contributing to the b2 community, it was a simple matter of publishing code I had written for my own blog/site. There was very little additional effort involved, the community was relatively small and technical, and I had the time to do it.
WordPress was created as a fork of b2 and it included some of the features I’d written for b2. Over time I ported the rest of them to WordPress, and began writing WordPress features as well.
When I created and ran the first design competition for WordPress it was because I believed that people’s vision of what could be done was too small. I saw the ability to do more and wanted to encourage people to push the limits on design. The results were excellent, hundreds of great designs were created and made available to the community.
WordPress evolved to support official plugins and themes and the community enjoyed explosive growth. I continued to create functionality that I thought was useful for WordPress and release it as plugins. This required more effort than it used to, because the WordPress community was becoming more mainstream and to be generally useful the plugins needed to be more polished, more forgiving of user error and required creating much more documentation.
Around this same time I was making the transition from an independent developer to a consulting and development shop that focused largely on WordPress development. I was hiring my first employees, getting a business off the ground, doing things like finding office space, worrying about making payroll, selling, etc. – my free time largely went away, and my ability to put out free plugins and themes went with it.
Now we have a team of about 15 people and my obligations to my team are greater than ever. I’ve also been blessed with a wonderful 18 month old daughter. She is a priority for me, the time spent with her and my family largely replaces time I previously used to contribute code back to the WordPress community.
Do you see indirect financial benefits in any other way, shape, or form?
I used to get about $100-200/month in the way of donations through my website. Unfortunately due to changes in the way plugins are presented on WordPress.org that has dried up to about $5/month.
I made it a priority to update all of our publicly released plugins this summer and hired an intern at Crowd Favorite to make this happen1. WordPress best practices evolve with each release, and plugins written properly just a few short years ago are badly outdated as a result. We’ve invested a significant about of money in this effort, and I honestly don’t expect to receive anything back from it.
Do the thanks and appreciation go anywhere near compensating the constant e-mail asking for support? What inspires your desire to give without return?
I actually feel strongly that the current situation is unsustainable. Unless the WordPress community at large starts to better recognize and reward the developers that create the tools that they use and rely on, the developers won’t/can’t continue to provide as they have.
In talking with other plugin developers, it seems fairly universal that the reward for a successful plugin is a deluge of support email that includes the worst kind of sense of entitlement, rudeness and ignorance. The community as a whole seems to expect to be able to pay nothing, yet received expert and individual help and support for free.
One of my goals with WordPress HelpCenter was to try to affect change in this area. My belief was that we could work with plugin developers to have them send support requests to WPHC, have WPHC provide commercial support services, and give a revenue stream back to the plugin developers. While WPHC has been successful overall, it has utterly failed in this effort. What we found was that regardless of the actual issue, users experiencing trouble with a plugin blame the plugin. They assume it’s a coding problem (even though it isn’t in most cases), expect free support and are so rude that we’ve lost people from our team as a result; ultimately having to refocus our efforts away from this type of support. One of my WPHC devs told me that he was amazed I kept my plugins freely available, that he would have killed them off long ago if he had experienced the type of feedback he was seeing now that I was forwarding my support requests to WPHC. I think this was a reasonable response, and that makes me sad.
I’m not sure what the solution to this is (my idea certainly didn’t get legs), but I know that I am very rarely willing to make the extra effort (and make no mistake, the process of packaging, documenting, writing extra code to make something as forgiving as possible to different environments and user error is typically more work than writing the code in the first place) to publicly release free plugins anymore.
I still see the WordPress community as a group that has wonderful potential and many bright spots. It’s for this reason that I am happy we are able to work within it. I really enjoy helping to push WordPress to become something more than it was before – for example via our Carrington Core platform and Carrington Build. We are also working on a new WordPress product that should really help WordPress adoption in environments where more sophisticated staging and deployment requirements are enforced.
I hope that the WordPress community and ecosystem is able to find a way to better support the contributions of individual developers as it continues to evolve. There are lots of smart people with good ideas trying to do the right thing, I’m optimistic that solutions can be found. I’ll certainly continue to support that effort however I can.
- Most of the work is done, we’re in the proces of final code review and polish. [back]
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Grant Griffiths, Stu McLaren, Gordon Brander, Devin Reams, Carl Hancock and others. Carl Hancock said: Great post by Alex King of @crowdfavorite on his experience releasing FREE plugins for WordPress: http://bit.ly/gmEODQ […]
Thanks for posting this Alex. I echo a lot of your sentiments about the deluge of support requests that come from users who feel they are entitled to free support just because they received the plugin “free”. It’s hard to continue being polite in response (I often will just ignore and not even respond).
I think what we’ll start seeing more of is the move towards “premium” or “freemium” models by developers. That’s the direction I’ve taken with organize series. The funny thing is, even though I offer what I consider to be a reasonable price for a “support package”, I still get users emailing me demanding free support and “appalled” that I’m charging such an “expensive” price for my support! Unbelievable.
I also want to just post here that I appreciated your try get the WPHC off the ground and help developers. I signed up pretty early with it. Have you paid out much commission to developers on it? I never received commission for Organize Series, but it was still nice being able to offer it to users.
Unfortunately we mostly got the same response you reference: “I still get users emailing me demanding free support and “appalled†that I’m charging such an “expensive†price for my support!”.
I’m not sure with Open Source Plugins, but I suspect it is the same with any open source contribution. I don’t think you can lump everyone in one group either. Some might do it for branding, although, I doubt that would be their only motivation.
Personally, I did it because I had a problem. I solved that problem, and decided that the best solution to keep the problem from happening was to contribute back to the project, so that I didn’t have to maintain my own personal “fork” of the project. The project called WordPress in this sense.
Again, personally, once my problems were solved or other people I felt could better handle what other problems I had came along, I stopped. Same thing with the plugins, but I no longer maintain them because they no longer have any personal use and my motivation has died with maintaining them.
“What inspires your desire to give without return?”
Simple. It serves my purpose to do so, however briefly. Writing Inline Documentation for WordPress? I just wanted to learn how to write phpdoc and test out the different ways it all works. The experience has been extremely helpful as I no longer require looking at a tutorial every time I want to document a function. I also have confidence to write phpdoc and other inline documentation for my code. It is no longer a chore as it once was.
Will I write inline documentation for WordPress or another project? No or at least not in the similar effort as before, but mostly no.
I’ve always hypothesized that it isn’t an altruist motivation to help with an open source project or release an open source plugin. For the majority of people, it is purely and largely has no additional cost for doing so. It is similar to the child that builds a sandcastle and says, “Look what I’ve done to everyone around.” Those that sell their plugins are most likely the smarter ones that create a queue and tell people to pay a dollar or 5 to see their awesome creation.
The idea behind not paying for support, and plugins period, is something I’ve definitely been thinking about a lot lately.
We, at my work, purchased an FAQ plugin and the support for updates costs $5/3 mos, and we haven’t decided to upgrade yet.
As I think about it more and about, there really should be some sort of business standard around support, upgrades, and the entire WordPress plugin eco-system.
It’s great that there are tons of free plugins available, but like you said, it’s not a sustainable business – unless you’re generating revenue directly from the plugins themselves (even if it’s a free download, but talking in terms of a monthly paid service.)
spot on Alex, good write up.
Thanks Alex,
This is a fantastic, sobering insiders perspective to the world of the plugin developer at the moment.
As a user I prefer premium plugins over free ones for longevity and currency. I always feel better knowing the developer has in income stream to maintain a grow their plugins.
I thing WordPress is moving toward the premium model as it matures as a business platform.
Thank you for all of your huge contributions to WordPress to date.
Kind regards
Tony
I can relate to the issues of plugin support. I used to enjoy providing support, but as my plugins’ popularity gained, I increasingly couldn’t keep up. Then when I became to busy to answer ANYTHING, there would be delays of up to two weeks where I would build a backlog before being able to respond, to which I was often blasted by users for not responding to their stupid questions fast enough (the complainers always ask the dumbest questions).
Now I rarely respond to my support forum and will shortly be cutting it off entirely as I don’t even like helping them anymore. It’s not fun having to wade through complaints from people unhappy with the free support I provide.
I used to create small plugins which I didn’t provide support for, but created larger more popular plugins which I did provide support for. I’m now likely to flip that, as the smaller plugins tend to attract more technical users who appreciate ANY free support more than the more generic plugins for the masses.
What was once a passion for providing plugin support has turned into a highly annoying once monthly chore for me. A chore I likely won’t be doing much of in the future – or at least not for free.
[…] post is in response to a write up entitled "Open Source Motivations" by long time WordPress developer, contributor and plugin author, Alex […]
[…] Alex King has published a great post today about Open Source Motivations. […]
some thoughts I wrote on a possibe way to reward plugin developers:
http://www.odharma.c[...]-developers/
I again enjoyed the article and all the conversation below. The more I read, the more brilliant I believe the WPHC is. It builds up a wall to deflect the discouraging barrage of e-mails, and deters insignificant ignorant questions. Users will be likely to rely more heavily on forums, and community assistance. I know the more help I receive on forums, the more likely I will go out of my way for others.
Paid support and customization leaves the quality customers, regardless of the level of inquiry, leaving a much greater satisfaction at the end of the day. One can’t take care of others until they’ve taken care of themselves. The difference between longevity and burnout.
Developers can then contribute to forums here and there at will, but have made it clear they have no obligation to do so. I’ve seen other plugins with premium support do so and gain greater user appreciation. It also serves as a type of trial making others more likely to buy in.
I have to admit, not being a developer myself, I’m cringing while writing this. Yet sustenance of this incredible community if far more important than the short term benefits.
I am writing this comment as a user, and a satisfied user of WordPress plugins and themes (mostly free of cost).
Let us look at the case of theme developers: The first theme that I used in another blog of mine was a free theme and I loved it – It was exactly the one that I was looking for. The theme author gave brilliant support too, for the free theme. After about ten months, I got my first payment from Google and the first thing I did was to buy a premium version of the theme offered by the same author. And trust me, the free version was far better and I reverted back to the free theme.
But the minimum time spent with that premium theme gave me good ideas about how it could be used and I successfully created one more blog with a different perspective (type of content) as I was enabled to do that with the premium theme! I am happy with both now, and both combined help me get more revenue. If I want another theme, you know where I will go. That’s loyalty and it benefits both of us.
The problem with plugins is that the users perceive them as enhancements and not primary requirements to enable them directly earn from a blog. If WordPress were to become a paid platform tomorrow, well gladly pay. But if a plugin were to become paid, we would either not have it (or) look around for free alternatives. I am just being frank and not undermining any plugin developer’s efforts.
But if a plugin has enabled me to earn more revenue or make the users really happy and kept them coming back (we see such value in themes, generally), we (any WP user) would gladly pay for it. Or at least donate an amount.
While the theme developers have successfully commercialized their efforts (there is always a period of time and efforts they invest in giving free themes and free support too), you say that the plugin developers have not been able to do so. That might be true in majority of cases and there are only two things I notice they could do – Wait for a longer period of time (hence creating a bigger brand and visibility for themselves and perhaps be hired for their services in the mean time), till the whole WP ecosystem becomes commercially mature where the publishers make enough money to be able to pay to the plugin developers who offer such awesome plugins and support (or)
Cut the costs of development – As you have mentioned, many create plugins for their own use and release it for creating some visibility. Many people do it to learn how to code too. This is where both WordPress and the ecosystem of developers are not doing what Google is doing – Get students and interns involved in the project and make them work on the smaller and newer plugins (Remember Google summer code, anyone?). Its a win-win situation, the students yearn for such practical exposure and oppurtunities and are willing to work without expecting much in return, too. It would be better if WP takes this initiative.
Destination Infinity
I made a decision to go premium plugin route around 8 months ago. And then it took me over 8 months to build everything what I though a premium plugin needs. Happy to launch it in few days.
About that time I wrote a really short article on the topic: http://www.prelovac.[...]ture-of-free
What I notice is that sentiment towards premium plugins is much worse that towards premium themes. While the latter are considered “cool”, “fancy”, “special”, authors of premium plugins are often despised (“how dare they charge for a plugin?”).
This is a very thoughtful and thought-provoking post, and most welcome. In spite of all your concerns, you managed to be “civil,” and that is most appreciated.
Because I am a definite neophyte to WordPress and blogging in general, I confess to my ignorance about making contributions to the developers involved in WordPress or any other domain. I truly was not aware of the opportunities for doing so, and I am quite sure I am not the only one. I certainly will remedy that situation, because I for one, am extremely grateful and awed at the ability of all the artists who spend time on such an interesting endeavor, and employ their talents for the benefit of all!
Best of luck to you and all others like you in receiving just restitution for all your fine work. Thank you!
[…] the creation of the project has published what I consider a fascinating post on his blog regarding his open-source motivations. The post contains his answers to questions provided by David Hobson who is currently performing […]
I’ve created a good WordPress plugins (look for those by user dartiss!) and I’ve always done it for the satisfaction rather than any monetary reason.
Which is a good job, as I’ve probably had over the last couple of years about $20 in donations. That would have been double but twice people have donated and then, at a later, time withdrawn the donation stating that they never meant to.
I make more money from advertising on my site – unfortunately, although the donation link is now not so obvious, where’s the link to the authors page gone?
I provide really good support – just look at the customer quotes on the “about” page of my site, yet often receive rude and, yes, ignorant comments and mails from people.
I do wonder sometimes why I do it.
It’s definitely an interesting problem, creating a revenue stream from open source contributions. I don’t completely understand some (I think I could argue most) of the users perspective regarding their expecation of free support.
When I released my first plugin, I started down the road of providing support. At first it wasn’t bad and it had me wondering what some of the other plugin developers had been complaining about. What I ended up discovering was the plugin never *really* took off. Sure, it has users, and sure, it’s been downloaded tens of thousands of times, but in the grand scheme of the WordPress community, that’s small potatoes I quickly found out.
Then I released my second plugin, which reached a far greater audience since it was security focused and came out around a time where lots of users sites were getting hacked at the large web hosting chop shops. This is when I really started to understand what Alex and others were talking about, and sadly I was still only seeing ~1/10th of the volume of support requests they get. Folks were rude, and felt so entitled. I was working a full time and was primarily developing it on weekends and evenings. But folks didn’t care. If I took more then a day or two to respond to someone that was often too long and only got me an asshole response back asking why I was so slow. If I didn’t say I was going to add feature X, or if I told them the “bug” they reported was intended behavior … whoa … I knew I’d be getting a firestorm back from them.
I think the point my rambling is going towards is this: I often wanted to ask the user where they worked and how they’d feel if I asked, and expected, them to provide free service to me. Oh, they’re a real estate agent? Mind finding and selling me a house? WTF do you mean you want to charge agent fee’s on the sale? Oh, that’s right, everyone has to put food on the table.
The customer service side of me always kept me from going down that road with a user. But I often felt if they couldn’t see that analogy on their own then they sort of need a punch in the face.
I finally got fed up with it and I no longer field support requests for my plugins. At this point my attitude is this: I had an itch and I scratched it with this plugin. Out of the kindness of my heart I am allowing you to download, modify, and distribute (if you want) the code I created. But it’s up to you to figure out how to install it, deal with behavior you don’t expect, etc. I only continue to develop it because for whatever reason, I find it interesting.
Coming to this mindset hasn’t been easy. There’s still times where I’ll see an email and want to respond to it. But at the end of the day it isn’t worth the stress for me. Folks weren’t willing to pay, so I moved on to other work that does put food on my table.
I do think we’ll continue to see WordPress grow, and more businesses set up their business model around it. However, I think that will largely be in terms of consulting shops (building custom themes, plugins, functionality for clients that mostly won’t be released to the public) and premium/freemium themes/plugins. I imagine we’ll see some folks continue to release free plugins for branding or because they’re just starting out, but it sort of seems like that is the only reason to do it at this point.
In other words, I could see plugins being released to WordPress.org becoming the equivalent of an interstate billboard for developers.
[…] Alex King‘s response contained this paragraph: In talking with other plugin developers, it seems fairly universal that the reward for a successful plugin is a deluge of support email that includes the worst kind of sense of entitlement, rudeness and ignorance. The community as a whole seems to expect to be able to pay nothing, yet received expert and individual help and support for free. […]
I think there are a lot of side benefits to releasing themes and plugins that you didn’t touch on, though I realize the scale of your projects means it’s also a bit different.
For me, with just a couple small releases, I’d say the vast majority of comments and questions I get from users are positive. (190 comments on this theme I released): http://wptheming.com[...]folio-theme/. Most start with “Thanks! I love your theme.â€
The questions users have tend to make me a better developer, and customization requests can turn into paid work. Sometimes it takes a bit of time to answer questions, but I think it’s a small payback for everyone who has helped me in the forums as I was learning.
The majority of traffic to my site and incoming links comes from the free items I’ve released. If I were still freelancing, this would doubtless translate to better jobs and more clients. If my site had more ads, it could also translate to revenue.
And all developers make mistakes. I’ve only learned PHP by reading other people’s themes, plugins and tutorials. By releasing something you get a lot of eyes on it to help you out. I’ve had much better developers than I update my code and e-mail it back to me, and even commit significant patches. This just happened two days ago with: http://wptheming.com[...]ns-panel-v2/ (read comments).
I realize that my projects are small beans compared to many other free plugins/themes, and support requests go up as a project grows- but I wanted to throw my perspective out there. I know many developers have had negative experiences, but for me, it’s been entirely positive.
When you think about it, the GPL is a lot like welfare.
Software released under the GPL is used by people who need it. The problem is that the majority of the people who enjoy the benefits feel they’re entitled to anything and everything they can get out of it without giving anything in return. Sad.
Hint: I’m only slightly cynical about the US welfare system.
Excellent read. We were facing similar issues as you are and I can certainly relate to this.
Our plugin ( http://wpml.org ) interacts heavily with themes and with other plugins, so we get many comments about things not working. Fortunately, our users are mostly professional developers, so most comments are polite and considerate.
We offer commercial support and it’s going fairly well. We’re not making a fortune from it. However, it helps us explain exactly why we don’t reply to anything else. Our support has three tiers:
1) Forum – it says on top that we’re not going to respond and you’ll get help from user users. This happens in practice and works great. We monitor the forum and jump in when it’s pretty clear that someone uncovered a serious bug.
2) Commercial support subscriptions – we answer questions about our plugin. We don’t debug and fix any code issue and we don’t promise to fix or address bugs. We just reply to questions and help people go the right way.
3) Consultancy work – we do whatever we’re hired for on an hourly basis. We can debug themes, server problems, interaction with other plugins, data corruption etc. We choose which jobs to take and defer others.
So, overall, it’s fair and works fine. I think that as long as it’s clearly stated, people understand and don’t expect you to give what you don’t want or can’t.
BTW, for reference, here is what’s covered (and what’s not covered) in our commercial support subscriptions:
http://wpml.org/part[...]ts-included/
” The community as a whole seems to expect to be able to pay nothing, yet received expert and individual help and support for free.”
I think you have hit the nail on the head, there needs to be some sort of process to help plugin authors financially whether by encouraging donations or a download fee and there needs to be better education within the community that GPL means Free as in Freedom not Free as in Free beer and that it does not mean free support!
Maybe a plugin store along the lines of the app store Apple has popularized?
Great post, really great post!
Indeed, I also feel most of what you said. I have almost 20 plugins developed in a stage that I can use them in my production site, but only half of those are published. After the plugin is finished, I still must build its readme.txt and main page, that takes even more time then developing the plugin itself and is very boring.
People keep complaning about using my plugins in PHP4 (and of course, blaming the plugin for the user keeping with an extremely outdated environment, and demanding me to divine what his environment is!). I fixed that testing PHP and WP versions and only loading the plugin when the required features are available, and providing feedback when aren’t… but I still didn’t have time to upate documentation to refer to this new feature and explain what it is and what to do when it’s faced.
I didn’t see rude feedback yet, but there are many bugfixes and feature requests that I left pending and won’t publish in the near future.
The main reason for me developing my plugins is to solve my needs on my own sites. Once they are done and work has been made, I just publish them to help the community.
I’ve also offered individual consulting for a charge, and had some great customers. Pression is bigger, but appreciation is also much greater. I’d make it my main profession if I could have security and stability in it.
I understand users (I’m one too, and living in Brasil I definetely don’t have money to spend!) want their sites working great and have little money to use on them. We developers complain of working for free, but most of our users also maintain their sites without profiting from them, so I feel that most of WordPress community is a poor or at least a low-profit one. That’s the down side of having an easy CMS: it’s a cheap one that anybody can use without spending.
In other CMSs, I don’t see much difference. Drupal deeply lacks features provided by free modules, most features that make it a powerful CMS seem to be charged, and many of those few free modules have messages where the author wanna give away his module to anybody intending to keep it alive. Clearly providing Drupal free modules isn’t worth it. Today it’s hard to have a Drupal based website with features we can’t have in WordPress without spending some resonable amount of money in it, and many features we have in WordPress we’d need to develop ourselves or pay for it.
With Joomla, well we know their history. It started as a free CMS where developers could work, developing great extentions and providing them for a monthly charge. But then, all of a sudden, its core developers decided to force everything to be GPL and killed that business model, making many brilliant contributors to go angry and leave.
I think the only successiful CMS may be ExpressionEngine. It’s proprietary, charged, and anybody can develop charged extentions for it. And the best: its users know from start that they’re gonna spend a lot of money, and also know they’re gonna receive high quality software and support.
I believe the solution for WordPress community would be valorize plugin developers, in replace of all the love they give to theme designers. First of all, WordPress owners must valorize us, and provide us tools to profit.
Firefox addon authors for exemple can add donation links to their addon pages hosted by Mozilla, to Firefox’s addon window and can even open their hosted page when an addon is updated. While Mozilla gives all that love to its contributors, in WordPress we plugin authors feel as if everybody (users, WP.org, WP oners, etc) own our plugins, we feel that we’re giving our plugins away and losing ownership of them, we can’t add links to our sites, we can’t charge, we can’t use non-GPL licences, we can’t use WP.org to host and promote premium plugins (premium themes are welcome!)… but we must support and maintain “THEIR” plugins, and for free!
If plugin developers could make it their main job and spend most of their effort developing high quality plugins, we could try to publish simple free plugins while selling premium versions to those who wanna have top quality features on their site.
And I believe that can be done using GPL. If all users donated and we earned money without having to hold back the code, we’d not need to worry and would simply offer it to the community. We’d have tranquility to work to increase quality and longevity to features everybody loves.
Maybe if WP.com stopped seeing us as competitors…
[…] has been going on about people's motivations to develop Open Source software, starting with Alex King's blog post and followed up by many others including Weblog Tools Collection. I disagree wholeheartedly with […]
Hey Alex,
Interesting read and very true. I often get “shit” from people who expect much for free and can seem to have the common decency to just be civil.
I’ve had requests to
– explain why I need donation
– remove the donation parts from my plugin as they can’t use it with their customer that way
– know why the f*ck a certain social network has not yet been added
along with being called a Dick and Asshole, all because I’ve tried to make their life a little easier with my plugin Share and Follow.
This is soften by the amount of positive vibes I get as well, but it only takes 1 not nice one to ruin my day.
Unlike the others here I am not relying on donations but have heavily invested in getting a CDN and making over 25 different icon sets that people can use for a yearly subscription. This is working well, but not yet turning round a profit on the outlay.
Strangely what I did see was that the more popular my plugin became (currently top of page 2 of most popular) the lower the amount of donations. It seems the more professional I went the more that users expect the whole thing for free.
[…] past week, several people related to the WordPress project have been discussing their motivations for working with […]
[…] people respond to my recent post reminded me of a scene in When Harry Met Sally (it’s about 51:50 in – watch on […]
I agree with the comments above it is not just plugins but the general public perception that internet opensource = “free”.
It just means that the author is making the Intellectual copyright of their work free, there is not even the assumption that the code is fit for purpose.
I released my first theme via WordPress on the 30th November called Atmosphere 2010, it is based on the twenty ten theme, I spent a lot of time and effort on it, submitted it, rejected, changed it several times to finally get it accepted.
It has had downloads of 300-500 a day, my rewards to date, extra traffic, $2 from Google Adsense, two helpful e-mails, and an email asking if I could make a wider version, without any reference to making a financial contribution.
I enjoyed the challenge of making the theme, I really enjoy that others like the theme enough to download it, I do like the people that take time to email if there is a bug, I want to fix any bugs for everyone, but I am not overjoyed with the one that wanted an enhanced version for free.
Money is not motivation for free plugin and theme authors, but would our work be appreciated more by people that are willing to pay the price of a couple of coffees for premium content, and how many download a plugin or theme because it is free and might be handy later?
David
[…] is an interesting post over on Alex Kings site – he is a plugin developer for WordPress. The conversation makes me […]
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[…] developers. It was a worthy topic of conversation when Alex King raised it last month in his Open Source Motivations post, and it’s a worthy topic […]
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[…] WP community a few months ago regarding “Open Source Motivations” that was sparked by a blog post from Alex King. I wrote a response along with some others including Jeff Chandler and Yoast. Everyone had very […]
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