[feedback] Developers pay

colak · 2007-04-29 16:42:48

I wonder what wordpress, punbb or RoR developers get from txd. If it is the same amount as ours do I think… (self censored).
Are any members here also contributors to any wordpress or RoR forums? Is this discussion happening anywhere else except here and in txd?

artagesw · 2007-04-29 18:40:30

As far as developers getting compensated for their efforts (which I whole-heartedly support), I think there is a deeper issue which needs to be resolved first, and it revolves around the question What is the entity that “owns” Textpattern?

I assume that today the legal entity that owns TextPattern is Dean Allen (correct me if I am mistaken). Yes, TextPattern is “free” and open source, but the project itself is still owned (eg. the copyright) by an individual. If TextPattern is to continue to grow and thrive and create a community that can attract monetary support for that growth, it really needs to “grow up” in terms of establishing a formal legal ownership structure around it.

This could be a for-profit corporate entity that makes money selling a “pro” version of the product and employs developers so that it can pay them out of the profits. Or this could be a non-profit organization that employs the developers or contracts develoment work out to them. There are many options.

But at this point there seems to be a degree of confusion and disorganization around the TextPattern project that will make it deifficult to attract serious attention to the problem of how to fund it as an ongoing concern.

Not to mention the non-financial problems that can eventually catch up with a project that has not addressed the issue of formal ownership structure (witness the Mambo-Joomla debacle from a couple years back).

Since Dean’s involvement seems to have waned to bascially nothing, perhaps it is time to ask him to gift ownership of TextPattern back to the TextPattern community, and establish a foundation or corporation for the purpose of moving the project forward.

jason · 2007-04-29 19:13:41

Let’s keep timelines straight here, when Textdrive started there was one Textpattern developer and that was Dean. There were no “developers” (plural). There wasn’t even a 1.0 release of textpattern. The release of textpattern under an open source license, putting out the trac site, releasing a 1.0 and then a 4.0, and expanding the commit team all happen after textdrive and were honestly as a result of a lot my efforts there (the first commit was me, I wanted a bigger commit team so it could survive, thought it had to be open sourced to stay relevant etc etc.). And txp’s use of trac and it’s model was replicated by the Ruby on Rails and Wordpress projects at textdrive.

Now Dean has done more then fine and will continue doing so from my estimates. All the initial VC200 payments went directly to Dean, and then I “professionalized” that “project” by forming an C-corp (“TextDrive Inc”) and functioning as it’s COO, and despite having enough for servers (no salaries or anything like that) for a couple of months, we’re still around 3 years later and there’s 18 full-time salaried people. Payments from textdrive for the textpattern project have always gone to the French company that Dean operates through and that “owns” the project (this is a business paying a business). How his project is managed beyond that, I don’t know. My attempts to employ the entire textpattern team at textdrive way back in the past (I think Alex is great for example) was stifled because Dean wanted to keep textpattern a separate thing (he could have folded the entire thing into textdrive whenever he wanted to), and I’ve been involved very little with textpattern or following it at the “business level” since then.

Now if the current and active development team thinks they’re doing a lot of work on the project, and it’s apparently for not a fair share of whatever pie, then I imagine I can either fix some aspect of that or figure out a way that they can begin to, but someone needs to actually let me know.

FireFusion · 2007-04-29 20:18:37

jason wrote:

My attempts to employ the entire textpattern team at textdrive way back in the past (I think Alex is great for example) was stifled because Dean wanted to keep textpattern a separate thing (he could have folded the entire thing into textdrive whenever he wanted to), and I’ve been involved very little with textpattern or following it at the “business level” since then.

Now that would have been interesting, provided it remained open source. Joyent has a great vibe about them with stuff like this and I know they’d stay true to their promises. Being a VC I can say I got my monies worth and continue to get more all the time.

Someone needs to get a hold of Dean and ask him to hand over the keys. Unless he has some plan I’m sure he’d be fine with it.

zem · 2007-04-29 22:07:14

First up: once again, Textdrive have been very helpful to the Textpattern dev team. They host all the textpattern.com sites, have upgraded our servers when we’ve outgrown the old ones, and given us patient advice when they’ve had no particular obligation to help (Jason and Filip in particular).

As I said earlier, Textdrive doesn’t owe us anything. The dev team has no complaints about Textdrive. As far as we’re concerned, they’re just a company that gives us free hosting, for which we are thankful.

Jason, thanks for stopping by and clarifying things.

Regarding all the free advice about what the dev team should do, and how open source works: we are not stupid. If we have not done something, there’s a reason for it. If you can do better than us, please send patches.

Regarding the “ownership” stuff: Textpattern is open source. There’s nothing to own. Copyright is held by a dozen different people; the Crockery codebase is BSD/MIT licensed, so there are essentially no restrictions on what can be done with the source. Calls for “ownership” to be handed over to someone else are basically meaningless.

marios · 2007-04-29 23:14:01

Sounds about right, what you say. Not to forget also, that Servers are sometimes brought down by Users.
However, having the TXD domains on some less busy Server would be great.

( I’d be willing to support my 5 cents towards something like that )

regards, marios

artagesw · 2007-04-29 23:42:20

zem wrote:

Regarding the “ownership” stuff: Textpattern is open source. There’s nothing to own. Copyright is held by a dozen different people; the Crockery codebase is BSD/MIT licensed, so there are essentially no restrictions on what can be done with the source. Calls for “ownership” to be handed over to someone else are basically meaningless.

I think you’ve missed my point. The very fact that copyright is help by multiple people is part of the problem. It makes the whole notion of ownership very fuzzy, but certainly not meangless. Let’s say I want to donate to the TextPattern project. Where does my money go when I click the Donate button? Whose bank account receives the deposit. Who decides what is to be done with the money and who is to receive it? Who pays taxes on it?

As a potential contributer of money to the project, I would like to have some insight into all of this. A formal ownership structure would help to povide that. And I believe far more people would be willing to contribute monetarily if such a structure were to exist.

I just clicked the Donate button to try and answer some of these questions for myself. It appears that your corporate business entity Threshold State will receive donations made through this button. Since Threshold State is presumably a for-profit corporate entity, the term “donation” is probably ill used. I suspect that money received through the button would be considered taxable income (in the US at least). And from what I can gather, Threshold State is not the same thing as Team TextPattern, but a separate company that makes money developing TextPattern-related sites and software.

I feel this simply goes to show that there is not a clear and distinct entity that the public can point to as the official TextPattern development and support organization, to which one might contribute money and know it is going to the desired purpose.

Last edited by artagesw (2007-04-29 23:43:28)

hcgtv · 2007-04-30 00:21:59

zem wrote:

Calls for “ownership” to be handed over to someone else are basically meaningless.

The Military has a saying that goes “Lead, follow or get out of the way”

So who’s the leader and what’s his vision?

zem · 2007-04-30 00:26:55

I just clicked the Donate button to try and answer some of these questions for myself. It appears that your corporate business entity Threshold State will receive donations made through this button. Since Threshold State is presumably a for-profit corporate entity, the term “donation” is probably ill used. I suspect that money received through the button would be considered taxable income (in the US at least). And from what I can gather, Threshold State is not the same thing as Team TextPattern, but a separate company that makes money developing TextPattern-related sites and software.

Thanks. I’ll forward your donation on to Mary once it’s cleared.

Threshold State is an Australian corporate entity. It pays taxes. It’s the commercial entity that represents and handles billing for Team Textpattern (which is essentially a consulting group). Threshold State doesn’t keep the donations, it just passes them on to team members.

Last edited by zem (2007-04-30 00:35:26)

zem · 2007-04-30 00:36:22

So who’s the leader and what’s his vision?

See for yourself.

guiguibonbon · 2007-04-30 00:36:48

artagesw wrote:

I feel this simply goes to show that there is not a clear and distinct entity that the public can point to as the official TextPattern development and support organization, to which one might contribute money and know it is going to the desired purpose.

Not only that, but also a clear and distinct entity that is entitled, for instance, to do textpattern marketing, to draw (business) plans regarding the future. I’m not saying the devs are not allowed to do such things, it’s only that the situation is fuzzy, and no-one seems to take these kind of responsabilities.

And, regarding the “submit patches” song. It only holds up to a certain point. I have myself pointed out some bugs and sent corrected code (not knowing how to do patches- which i do now btw). But if we have no idea what future features you’re planning to integrate, what more could we possibly do? There’s more than a dozen of us having frequent thoughts about how we’d like textpattern to evolve, and ready to start working ont them, only these are never really listened to.

The only thing the community is actually asked for now and then, is how we’d accept to pay you, which in a certain sense, is the last of our concerns (i mean, the modality, not the paying on itself).

In other words, textpattern has nothing of a real community-project. The community is only artificialy invited to participate, and the actual decision-holders show inabilities when it comes to decision-making, possibly because they don’t feel entitled to.

zem · 2007-04-30 00:42:18

And, regarding the “submit patches” song. It only holds up to a certain point. I have myself pointed out some bugs and sent corrected code (not knowing how to do patches- which i do now btw). But if we have no idea what future features you’re planning to integrate, what more could we possibly do? There’s more than a dozen of us having frequent thoughts about how we’d like textpattern to evolve, and ready to start working ont them, only these are never really listened to.

Again: the features that will be integrated into Textpattern are the ones that we have. We select from the available patches and code contributions. We can’t predict what people will submit in future. That’s how open source works.

In other words, textpattern has nothing of a real community-project. The community is only artificialy invited to participate, and the actual decision-holders show inabilities when it comes to decision-making, possibly because they don’t feel entitled to.

Each time we invite the community to participate and contribute, or to propose a new initiative, it seems we end up getting told in no uncertain terms to butt out and leave the community alone.

Textpattern’s quality, speed and stability reflects the fact that the dev team is very good at making decisions. What you’re asking for is not decisions, but resources. It’s completely meaningless to say “the next version will include Feature X”, because that won’t be true unless someone takes the time to build it.

Last edited by zem (2007-04-30 01:23:10)

hakjoon · 2007-04-30 01:13:05

zem wrote:
We can’t predict what people will submit in future. That’s how open source works.

No but you can predict which features would move Textpattern towards it’s goal (whatever that is). Open Source is not 1000 monkeys with 1000 typewriters.

Each time we invite the community to participate and contribute, or to propose a new initiative, we end up getting told in no uncertain terms to butt out and leave the community alone.

When did this happen? I certainly missed it (the telling you to butt out part)

It’s completely meaningless to say “the next version will include Feature X”, because that won’t be true unless someone takes the time to build it.

Sorry but as one of the developers you can state that “the next version will have Feature X” and then code it for the next version.

Last edited by hakjoon (2007-04-30 01:14:02)

zem · 2007-04-30 01:53:58

No but you can predict which features would move Textpattern towards it’s goal (whatever that is). Open Source is not 1000 monkeys with 1000 typewriters.

We’re working on that. Will announce something when it’s ready.

Sorry but as one of the developers you can state that “the next version will have Feature X” and then code it for the next version.

The features I have time to code are the ones people hire me to build. Anyone has the ability to announce Feature X and then code it for the next version.

Last edited by zem (2007-04-30 01:55:15)

guiguibonbon · 2007-04-30 02:09:29

hakjoon wrote:

Each time we invite the community to participate and contribute, or to propose a new initiative, we end up getting told in no uncertain terms to butt out and leave the community alone.

When did this happen? I certainly missed it (the telling you to butt out part)

I have rather seen the opposite : everytime the community is showing willingness to contribute (take Image Improvement thread, and Admin facelift for instance); it looks as if devs are intentionaly refusing to give any direction. In Admin Facelift, the message has been : “oh yeah, go on, only it’s useless until we make the admin xhtml/css, which will be for crockery, which will possibly never really be out anyway”. How much would it have cost to say : “Good job guys, but to see this become reality, we’d need one of you to turn the admin into decent HTML.” And then explain how that collaboration might technicaly become a reality. Another classical answer is “make into a plugin”. MLP for instance never should have been a plugin/hack thing, which is way too hard to maintain, and is doomed to die anytime soon.

And regarding the rest of your answer, you seem to be confusing “to-do lists” with “will-be lists”. We’re not asking for promises. We’re asking for directions as to where we can help. You know, the kind of things you must be telling each other on IRC. We’re not asking for ressources, we’re offering, and would just like to know where and how they might be useful.

Last edited by guiguibonbon (2007-04-30 02:10:53)

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#46 2007-04-29 16:42:48

Re: [feedback] Developers pay

#47 2007-04-29 18:40:30

Re: [feedback] Developers pay

#48 2007-04-29 19:13:41

Re: [feedback] Developers pay

#49 2007-04-29 20:18:37

Re: [feedback] Developers pay

#50 2007-04-29 22:07:14

Re: [feedback] Developers pay

#51 2007-04-29 23:14:01

Re: [feedback] Developers pay

#52 2007-04-29 23:42:20

Re: [feedback] Developers pay

#53 2007-04-30 00:21:59

Re: [feedback] Developers pay

#54 2007-04-30 00:26:55

Re: [feedback] Developers pay

#55 2007-04-30 00:36:22

Re: [feedback] Developers pay

#56 2007-04-30 00:36:48

Re: [feedback] Developers pay

#57 2007-04-30 00:42:18

Re: [feedback] Developers pay

#58 2007-04-30 01:13:05

Re: [feedback] Developers pay

#59 2007-04-30 01:53:58

Re: [feedback] Developers pay

#60 2007-04-30 02:09:29

Re: [feedback] Developers pay

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