[Plugin: TBTestimonials] Tbar… Wow… that's ballsy and not in a good way…

i’m in agreement about this

what if all plugin developers started doing this?

i appreciate you need to advertise your work and this plugin is free, but whats wrong with putting a page within your plugin section for the same info? rather than on every page when logged in (via admin bar)

Travis, your first mission in life is to feed and otherwise support yourself and your family. So I say never apologize for configuring your free offerings in any way you choose. Especially when you are clearly flexible in your offering and would be happy to just get paid for a version that is more palatable to the end user.

If anyone is frustrated with how a developer tries to monetize something that they are giving out for free, you need look no further than the refusal of the official repo to become an app store for plugins.

People are likely not going to “donate” but are 100% likely to complain when we have to patchwork together ways to get paid for contributing.

I would wager that if you were getting respect from the community for your work and getting paid then you never would have spend time trying to figure out how to get further in peoples faces.

Let’s fix the way this all works so that developers get their due instead of complaining that what we get for free is free enough.

One way to do that would be add some better official hooks to encourage plugin authors to request attention in a singular way. Say a persistent donation meta box in the admin with add_plugin_donation_request(array(whatever should be included))

Sharing is caring and that goes for code and for money.

“What I can say is that NO ONE wants to turn .org into a commercial repo where plugins are sold.”

What about me?

I absolutely want that. Maybe the plugins are only .99 like on the iphone. So the 1500 people that are using my plugin might have ponied up and I could pay a bit of my taxes.

The problem is that, even though you could create that on your own. Not having it in core effectively biases everyone against that approach.

My basic problem is. Where are the ethics in using someone else’s work and not compensating them. Why do we have a minimum wage and child labor laws?

The wordpress repo encourages people to contribute for free and then essentially beg people to value their contribution. Or artificially segment the value of their work in crazy mixed up schemes to give a bit of functionality and then try and get people buy into a paid solution that has to have all it’s own delivery infrastructure.

What is the good argument for not setting up a market place? Do you think getting paid would lower the quality of wordpress plugins? That is completely counter intuitive.

I pay for gravity forms, and I see zero good reason why I shouldn’t be able to install it via the repo even though it needs a code. It just makes life harder.

I’m not buying the argument that everything has to be free. It is actually ridiculous and more than a little insulting to contributors that they have to work so hard and scheme to figure out how to monetize their work.

WordPress needs the Apple model. Unless you are just allergic to making a living. They have free stuff there. If WordPress really wants to be the center of the universe. Enable the developers with a real business model.

I get it, it just makes no sense. And I don’t believe that WordPress.org is not in some way geared to be anti WordPress.com competition. You can see the service offering continual expanding and the wall between what is “official” WordPress and what is not is clearly defined.

It will keep coming up when people who are giving something away for free are criticized in any way for the form of that thing.

I have no desire to be a bore. I just want to be convinced and I keep feeling like I’m being hit by internet trolls when people keep touting something open source and free as being great. A sustainable labor force is way more important to me than open coding.

I suppose I don’t care that they wordpress.org repo is only free. But wouldn’t it be great if there was a second paid repo we could all get on board with that was installed by default.

What is the argument against that? And how is not being in favor of that respectful of the development community. Would it harm the free portions any more than the existence of VaultPress or VideoPress?

The reason I jumped on this thread is I hate seeing someone giving something away for free having to defend the form of that thing. It’s free. There is no reasonable expectation that it meet any criteria. It if doesn’t meet the repos criteria it can be removed. If it does than they only reasonable action is respectful request that it might be different to meet the community standard.

My first response is always empathy. If I install a plugin and it throws something up on my dashboard, or anywhere and I don’t like it I at least understand why it is happening.

Implying that the person is untrustworthy. That’s just nonsense.

Just to be clear, I’m not on squarespace.com forums complaining about how they run their business. Open Source implies and comes from a place where people discuss ethics and the right and wrong of what should and show not be. That rubs me the wrong way, because once you start down the road of legally binding other people with licenses based upon your visions of ethical behavior (the gpl), you open yourself up to endless scrutiny of your own commercial activities.

I respect your desire to be done with the conversation. I’m super tired of it myself. As a person that is trying to make a living in the web space, that values the independent lifestyle, for myself and for others. I think having source code that you can base your work on provides great opportunity to participate in the market and not have to move to a regimented corporate lifestyle.

However, that is what I believe the primary benefit of source is, that it allows people who facilitate solutions to be able to modify those to meet the needs of customers. I don’t think free and open are equal concepts. Free devalues things that have value and at is core is lie, if something has value someone else paid for it even though you might have consumed it without paying. In most circumstances someone pretends to give you something for free while charging you a price for something else that also pays for the free thing.

In WordPress free means that the person receiving it is just completely devaluing your contribution if they don’t donate. I find the idea that encouraging people to devalue their own work and the work of others to be weird and not in any way a moral position to take.

I want to be convince otherwise, because I like the idea of finding the moral high ground and occupying it. So when I see people moralizing I want one of them to be without reproach so I have something to follow. And it breaks my brain when I feel like people are falling short.

To be clear, your opinion on the appropriate place to market your plugin is not necessarily wrong in my opinion. I just think that if there is a right and wrong way to do it, we need to bake the standards into core and provide hooks to encourage that it is done in the right way. Instead of having everyone do it haphazardly because it is really not supported at all.

I have a plugin that has some 1500+ downloads. And I’m considering updating it to include some more marketing for me. I want to find the “right” way to do that, and since so many others are in the same position doesn’t it make sense to put in place some physical code standards rather than just having track down the 1000 different ways people are addressing that problem and risk getting bad reviews because you picked the wrong answer.

So I’m on board that it should be brought up, I just smelled an uncivil tone which I don’t response well to. Especially when I haven’t had much sleep.

Consider the idea for a minute that maybe there should be a support status readout. So for free plugins, you could go an donate a requested amount which entitles you to some offered support. So when you go into your plugin list you can see which plugins you have support for and which you don’t with the opportunity to jump to the donation page and enable the support flag.

That way it isn’t a paid plugin but you are able to keep track of support. So when you go to update your plugins you can be clear which ones you can update with an assurance that if it breaks you have a way to request a fix from the source.

Again, you can clearly make and sell stuff yourself, but the real value is being able to get exposure to the millions of wordpress.org sites. So the good opportunities to support the development community are all in the hands of the core team. The farther away you push the call to action to support plugin developers, the more out of site out of mind it is.

In the long run, finding a middle ground is only going to help WordPress by keeping developers away from other cms platforms. Every developer that stays away from other solutions is another coin in the pocket of Matt Mullinweg because of the Halo affect of people signing up for and using WordPress.com. And that is biggest argument for a marketplace run by WordPress.com.