Do *all* open source CMSs suffer from financial starvation?

wet · 2007-05-31 06:59:09

In recent news:

Drupal, operating such prominent sites like the german Playboy site, parts of the United Nation’s web, or the Grateful Dead band site, is looking for funds by considering

annual membership fees for a professional network and
advertising on their official website.
Donations won’t work for them, either.

Looks familiar, though I wouldn’t have expected this to happen to Drupal with an installed base exceeding Textpattern’s by orders of magnitude (I assume).

6sigma · 2007-05-31 13:24:08

Your thread title asks a key question.

Clearly some opens source products have larger target markets than others. CMS’s probably trail operating systems in target audience size. However, there are smaller open source products that seem to get the financial backing they need. Not knowing the early history of Opera or OpenOffice.org or Ubuntu or Firefox or Gaim or Keepass, et al, it’s unclear what the best way might be to structure the financial support of Txp, its developers and its future.

If you take this forum’s registered user count of fewer than 10,000 people as some approximate proxy for the actual user count of Textpattern, and you extrapolate any donation from a percentage of that count, you realize that the operating costs for the next five years of Textpattern development aren’t getting met. For example, 33% of Txp users are registered in the forums and 10% might donate $100 per year…that’s 3000 people giving a total of $300,000 annually, and not a likely scenario. If, on the other hand, there are only 7500 active users and 2% drop $10.00 in the bucket, we’re looking at $1500. That’s not even six months of country club dues!

Does Txp need a benefactor (a la Ubuntu)? Is there a way to remain small in user count, but meet the annual needs of those who develop and support the product? Must the user count grow dramatically? Will Txp forever be a labor of love?

Instead of snarky remarks about developers or their approaches or the product, we need a real dialog about how best to structure an open source project for long-term success. Surely there are models that have been successful and match Txp’s needs.

What leads an open source product to long-term financial viability?

hcgtv · 2007-05-31 16:32:57

Let’s talk in philosophical terms.

Open Source, the concept, has changed the software landscape. Looking down at my WinXP Taskbar, all I see are free apps running happily and allowing me to do my daily work. A web browser, an email client, a text editor, a music player and the list goes on. Let’s not even look towards the Debian workstation sitting next to the Windows laptop.

From where I sit, not having to pay for something equates to a gain in my wallet’s size. It’s how I justify my work on Open Source projects, I’ll tackle a forum, you work on a CMS, maybe someone else will do a gallery and we’ll meet somewhere in hyperspace using Firefox.

Yes, it’s Utopian, but isn’t that the idea – Free software for the masses, no yearly upgrade fees, user to user help, we all own the company kind of thing?

Imagine no possesions, I wonder if you can.
No need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man.
Imagine all the people, sharing all the world…

zero · 2007-05-31 18:21:47

Very nicely put, Bert. And today is my mum’s birthday and Imagine was her favourite song and played at her funeral.

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
Say some day you’ll come and join us
And world will live as one.

0
o
o
.
_

wet · 2007-05-31 18:52:01

Bert, you’re quite right from a contributor’s point of view.

But I heavily doubt that anybody out of – say – Hugh Hefner’s empire ever coded a single line or contributed in any other of the possible ways in exchange for the free Drupal copy they use to collect their member’s fees. This is what tickles me.

Jeremie · 2007-05-31 21:13:27

They give notoriety, visibility, live testing. They may not give back as much as they get, but still.

hakjoon · 2007-05-31 23:03:21

wet wrote:
But I heavily doubt that anybody out of – say – Hugh Hefner’s empire ever coded a single line or contributed in any other of the possible ways in exchange for the free Drupal copy they use to collect their member’s fees. This is what tickles me.

I guarantee you the design house that built the site for them got a since amount of cash. Ideally they gave given something back, but probably not.

Although more development houses springing up around a product means more people being paid to work with the product, which means more developers know the product, which can lead to more code contributions, which could lead to core developers getting jobs in which they enhance the product.

I know here in Washington DC there are at least 2 development houses that are based completely on Drupal. At UVa the library was heavily invested in Apache Lenya and one of our developers became a core contributor, he was essentially being paid to help develope Lenya.

No money went into Lenya directly but developers were being paid just through different people.

We use TinyMCE at work, we contribute code back. Developers being paid to work on TinyMCE but not through MoxieCode.

sarcasm. Maybe the problem is TXP attracts too many designers.

I was interviewing at a place that was thinking of basing their development around TXP. I would have been paid to work on TXP. Unfortunately they went with something else, and now I’m in asp.net land all day *shudder

Logoleptic · 2007-06-02 04:42:12

Patrick, my heart goes out to you.

As for the question at hand, it does seem that some of the most successful and widely-used OSS projects have some kind of corporate sugar daddy. WordPress has Automattic. Linux its satellite projects have RedHat, IBM, and others. If there’s an OSS project surviving on a donation model alone, I’m not aware of it. I think a lot of people hoped that TextDrive might fill the benefactor role for Txp, but it didn’t work out that way.

Here’s an idea: Maybe the core devs could go corporate, selling development and implementation services to subsidize continued work on the core CMS. The user-to-user help of the forums would still exist—and be used by most people—but corporate users would have that comfort zone of “official support.” Is this was the Team Textpattern effort is trying to do? If so, how is that working out (he asked, nosily)?

Jeremie · 2007-06-02 08:04:01

For TXP, Joyent should now support – a little – the TXP development. No IBM sure, but still. And yes, Team Textpattern already sell their services to various customers.

Mary · 2007-06-02 08:13:01

It hasn’t been successful.

Tinshack · 2007-06-02 14:47:04

Perhaps the problem is that most projects start out as a labour of love. Initially it’s something fun to do when there’s nothing better. The “lucky” projects become bigger and eventually, successful and take more and more of the initiator’s time. If things get big enough they start intefering with real life things. This is about the point where people start looking for something more than just a warm fuzzy feeling after doing something good.

Money makes the world go round, but now our hero is faced with a dilemma. By now they have may a small following (10, or 10 000 doesn’t matter). At least a part of that following is relying on this free service that’s been provided up until now (new features, updates, a new picture of his dog, etc). It seems a unfair to yank the carpet from under the followers’ feet (by charging for stuff). Doing so will probably force most of them to go somethere else thereby causing the entire undertaking to collapse. Yet by not getting any kind of financial backing things also start going backwards. The initiator has less and less motiviation to continue working on the project. Things like updates become less frequent and eventually the project may fall into disrepeair (think about how may projects you know of that are truly resurected after such an occurrence).

Asking people for donations might seem like asking for money at a traffic light (and how many people are going to offer anything anyway). Yet it’s not to say that the followers aren’t adding value to the project. There are all sorts of contributions all the time (feature suggestions, plugins, patches, themes, etc), but not everybody can or wants to contribute financially.

This is why ideas like Team Textpattern come about. Unfortunately many of these ideas are all too quickly enveloped in negative sentiment. People immediately see these things as being a scheme for somebody to get rich quick, even though the intention is simply to generate some revenue for further development of the project.

Long live Textpattern!

Last edited by Tinshack (2007-06-02 14:50:00)

wet · 2007-06-02 15:00:13

A simple thought: Every other free service on the web tries to convert eyeballs into advertising revenue. Open Source doesn’t spell “communism”, so why not accept an advertiser’s offers here? Sensible, of course… No PPC.

Last edited by wet (2007-06-02 15:00:33)

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#1 2007-05-31 06:59:09