Hi Nyall,
<THEORETICALLY>
It would seem tricky that qgis.org both offers/promotes a gratis & FOSS
"market place" (the current official plugin repository), and a paid one.
That could be conceived, but if qgis.org would promote in some way the
paid market place, this would create some expectation on the quality of
the plugins proposed for a fee, and QGIS itself, which could create some
tensions with users.
The theoretical question of someone buying a paid (GPL) plugin (or maybe
just finding its source code somewhere) and making it a gratis plugin
once it has obtained its source code would be quite untainable if
qgis.org managed both market places. The spirit & letter of the GPL is
that anyone can improve existing code and share it with others, so it
would be a hard take to prevent someone from distributing an
improved/modified version of a paid GPL plugin in the gratis repository,
and obviously having the same entity managing both market places would
be a conflict of interest.
I'm not sure if the non-profit status of qgis.org would allow it to
manage a paid marketplace.
I was wondering about the connection between Blender Market, LLC the
private company behind blendermarket.com, and Blender.org the OSS
organization, since that could be an interesting situation with respect
to trademark.
https://blendermarket.com/page/about brings interesting clues about why
it's working:
- "The Blender Market is independently owned and operated and has no
affiliation with The Blender Foundation."
but:
- "The Blender Market is a proud Corporate Gold member of the Blender
Development Fund"
I don't know if blender.org has some sort of gratis plugin repo, or if
not, more generally how they would welcome a code contribution in their
software coming from OSS code from the paid market place... I assume
they must have some policy on how to handle such situation.
All in all, I believe that such organization, with a clear separation of
the .org and the .com as different legal entities, with a "win-win"
relationship, would probably be the best solution if one wanted to
implement that.
</THEORETICALLY>
Even
Le 01/02/2024 à 02:28, Nyall Dawson via QGIS-Developer a écrit :
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
<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
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