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Re: Do *all* open source CMSs suffer from financial starvation?
Jeremie wrote:
For TXP, Joyent should now support – a little – the TXP development.
They do. They cater for the hosting capacities. That’ been discussed and it was commonly taken as a noble approach from Joyent’s side – given the VC history and all that jazz.
From the download stats of my own plugins I am able to deduct that Textpattern is used by companies and design agencies for notable projects – this is no “Mom’ N’ Pop plus their Kitty” weblog script. How would these agencies justify the decline of their core publishing system in case Textpattern goes belly up?
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Re: Do *all* open source CMSs suffer from financial starvation?
wet wrote:
Open Source doesn’t spell “communism”, so why not accept an advertiser’s offers here?
Why not, offering up different sections of the Textpattern home page is an excellent way to bring in some monies. I’d rather see an ad here and there than to see threads about how to fund development, makes people want to go run EE, I shudder at the thought.
I think there are many ways for a project with the clout of Textpattern to generate monies for the core developers and those creating plugins, themes, etc.
- Ping Textpattern.com should go live, who’s updated and when – bring back the excitement.
- Some RSS feeds in the admin, like Wordpress is doing – bring attention to what’s going on.
- Encourage users to sign up at the forum during an install, those that associate their installs with a forum id get access to special help forums where their questions get priority.
- Verified installs, no TxPID, no updates for languages.
We Love TXP . TXP Themes . TXP Tags . TXP Planet . TXP Make
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#15 2007-06-02 18:18:42
- Logoleptic
- Plugin Author
- From: Kansas, USA
- Registered: 2004-02-29
- Posts: 482
Re: Do *all* open source CMSs suffer from financial starvation?
Jeremie said
For TXP, Joyent should now support – a little – the TXP development.
Never gonna happen. They have their own commercial software to develop and support: Connector, Accelerator, Strongspace, BingoDisk, and now Slingshot. Frankly, they’re over-extended.
Getting support tickets answered in less than two weeks (!) is like pulling teeth. Even then, response quality has generally gone downhill. The response to my last support ticket was, essentially, “Here’s an Apache log dump. Fix it yourself.” The log dump wasn’t even useful, since it was for the wrong day.
Needless to say, I’m looking for another host. Any suggestions?
Mary wrote
It hasn’t been successful.
Support from Joyent, or Team Textpattern?
If the latter, was it due to a lack of demand from high-end clients?
If that’s the case, how could the community propel Txp into use in enterprise settings, where paid support and services is important and cost is more relative? WordPress is being used at major newspapers and by huge corporations; how did they get there? What can we learn from that example?
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#16 2007-06-02 18:48:15
- Logoleptic
- Plugin Author
- From: Kansas, USA
- Registered: 2004-02-29
- Posts: 482
Re: Do *all* open source CMSs suffer from financial starvation?
wet said
From the download stats of my own plugins I am able to deduct that Textpattern is used by companies and design agencies for notable projects – this is no “Mom’ N’ Pop plus their Kitty” weblog script.
I missed this when writing my last response. (Note to self: check page count before posting.)
Anyone have some suggestions on how to encourage donations from professional designers / developers who can afford it? Some kind of “Textpattern Professionals Network” has been suggested occasionally on this forum. A few questions about that:
- What kind of benefits would this need to confer before agencies and freelancers would sign up?
- What would the price of membership be?
- Would there be monthly, annual, and lifetime memberships at different price points?
- In order to maintain the program’s credibility, would there need to be some kind of qualification process? What would those qualifications be?
hcgtv suggested
Ping Textpattern.com should go live, who’s updated and when — bring back the excitement.
Six Apart did this back in the day. A donation of $xx (I think it was $45 USD) would get you a spot on the Movable Type home page whenever your blog was updated. It was enough to motivate me back when I first started my personal blog, and it did generate some of my early traffic. I like this idea.
Some RSS feeds in the admin, like Wordpress is doing — bring attention to what’s going on.
This “feature” generates gripes among some WP users, who would rather skip the news updates and get right to work when they login. The fact that it hasn’t been removed tells me that it must be doing its job, however.
That said, one of the benefits of Txp is its fairly straightforward interface. Login —-> write. I’ve got mixed feelings about things that might interfere with that.
Encourage users to sign up at the forum during an install, those that associate their installs with a forum id get access to special help forums where their questions get priority.
If you can find a way to monetize this with a specific price, then it might be a good idea. Staffing the priority help forums would be a problem, however. The price tag would need to cover staffing costs, plus a bit of profit. Otherwise, it’s just another time sink for the core devs.
Verified installs, no TxPID, no updates for languages.
If this is something you’d charge for, it brings Txp into the realm of crippleware. That’s a Very Bad Idea, and may even violate the GPL.
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#17 2007-06-02 20:55:46
- FireFusion
- Member
- Registered: 2005-05-10
- Posts: 698
Re: Do *all* open source CMSs suffer from financial starvation?
I noticed the new google ads on the home page. I think you should also try Text-link-ads
Their link calculator predicted some decent monthly incomes for this domain.
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Re: Do *all* open source CMSs suffer from financial starvation?
Wet,
Great topic. Thanks for bringing it up. Fascinating discussion.
- I am Squared Eye and I
am launchinghave launched Pattern Tap
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#19 2007-06-04 05:30:49
- Mary
- Sock Enthusiast
- Registered: 2004-06-27
- Posts: 6,236
Re: Do *all* open source CMSs suffer from financial starvation?
I wrote:
It hasn’t been successful.
Adam wrote:
Support from Joyent, or Team Textpattern? If the latter, was it due to a lack of demand from high-end clients?
The team, and yes. We got a handful of enquiries from the only-curious (which we expected), from those with understandably low budgets (but as often happens in web dev, sometimes still unrelatively high expectations), and a small number of those from the target market. Since we started (a year ago) I’ve personally worked on a grand total of 3 small projects, and I don’t foresee the prospects changing any time soon. We’re presently working on something different.
If that’s the case, how could the community propel Txp into use in enterprise settings, where paid support and services is important and cost is more relative? WordPress is being used at major newspapers and by huge corporations; how did they get there? What can we learn from that example?
I really don’t know the answers to that.
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Re: Do *all* open source CMSs suffer from financial starvation?
Mary wrote:
I really don’t know the answers to that.
Is the donations/payment process too simple for medium-sized or larger corporations?
At least here in Austria (and maybe even the rest of Europe – I don’t know for sure), it is quite uncommon for a company representative to click a PayPal button, and it’s a lot simpler to issue a purchase order and pay the invoice than to pay per credit card with no paperwork to back this payment request.
Any insights from someone working at medium sized, not owner-run soho web agency?
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Re: Do *all* open source CMSs suffer from financial starvation?
wet wrote:
Is the donations/payment process too simple for medium-sized or larger corporations?
I can’t imagine a bigger webshop here in Jpn doing that over paypal or similar, esp. if the client is a bigger company.
Even small fish like me (basically a 2 head + 1 goldfish operation) needs to think twice before using this method of payment for some projects.
Where is that emoji for a solar powered submarine when you need it ?
Sand space – admin theme for Textpattern
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Re: Do *all* open source CMSs suffer from financial starvation?
wet wrote:
Is the donations/payment process too simple for medium-sized or larger corporations?
yes, i think that’s a problem. even for small studios. if i’d have to purchase a license (or something like that) to use txp for my client, than i could easily charge the client for that. as i would have a proper invoice, i’d be able to set it off against tax liability (don’t know if that’s the right vocabulary). you can’t do that with donations for software, at least under german tax law, so it’s basically me paying money, unrelated to my business. and i really have to force myself to do that each and every time. i’m well aware that having a “commercial” txp version raises another debate (which we had quite often), though…
Last edited by sthmtc (2007-06-04 07:59:36)
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Re: Do *all* open source CMSs suffer from financial starvation?
IMO open source projects don’t ask for donations often or specifically enough. How can it be said “donations aren’t enough” if you’ve never set a target, explained where the funds will exactly go (a budget?), had a banner on all the official sites, had three-times-annually official fundraisers/donation drives where you asked the users to please convert their goodwill into a moderate amount of cash, for X specific goals? Is there a feeling that this would be too agressive or look too desparate? I would prefer the project to look desparate if that is the true financial state that they’re in, and to have that expression before resorting to other means like ads, pro feature sets, whatever.
I suggested introducing a Donate tab that went away upon annual payment, but it kinda went down like a lead balloon…?
cheers, Brianna
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Re: Do *all* open source CMSs suffer from financial starvation?
Food for thought.
Rhizome asks for money in four ways.
- membership US$25/year
- donations during membership renewal. They also offer optional presents during membership but they are yet to offer any T-shirts:)
- Annual net/email based funding campaigns with a specific sum (similar to ransomware but without the threat)
- site hosting
The site is operated by the New Museum in NY so I’m sure they get other funding too. To my knowledge they always meet their annual operational costs. Whatever… The above is all that they ask from their community.
I’m off to venice tomorrow for a week. Hope to see some outcome from this discussion when i come back:)
Last edited by colak (2007-06-04 16:32:32)
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