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Re: [feedback] Developers pay
Mary wrote:
Yiannis: Are you sure you’re not talking about sending money through a PayPal account verses a credit card? ‘cuz I’ve looked that page over more than once and understand that list to mean those are the banks PayPal will deal with for user accounts (deposit and withdrawal from account), and receiving payments in that country’s currency. As far as I know, Visa/MasterCard don’t care where you’re from, and that was why PayPal added that capability?
Hi Mary
The url i posted clearly defines the countries which can Send. Receive. Withdraw. and the ones which can Send Money to Anyone in the Growing PayPal Network which is where Cyprus and a lot of other countries are. What they mean with that is that the countries listed there are allowed to receive money but not to pay. At least this was the case up to 6 months ago… Basically I know no one here in Cyprus who deals with paypall because of that restriction.
If that is definitely not the case – which would suck – what other options are there, apart from the usual expensive merchant accounts?
One method which steve (net carver) used regarding his mlp plugin was donations/gifts via amazon.com – which is the option I followed:)
A Premium Support Option
Er, was that not something already shouted down? But hey, if you missed that poll (or perhaps changed your mind) it’s still open for feedback.
I have already voted for that and I also made some comments here which include the paypal problem:)
Last edited by colak (2007-04-29 07:57:26)
Yiannis
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Re: [feedback] Developers pay
zem wrote:
I agree. We’ve tried donations in the past, and the amount it brings in is basically pocket money (I mean no offence to those who donated). With basically no marketing, a week’s worth of revenue from the Redirect Pro plugin easily exceeded a year’s worth of donations to Team Textpattern. (It’s still not much, but enough to suggest the idea has merit).
Numbers aside, I’m a professional, not a busker. We’ve been working for a long time on ways to earn an honest living building Textpattern. It’s difficult and frustrating. There is no shortage of ideas, just time and knowledge and experience and resources.
The “Textpattern Membership” proposal was one of those ideas. The reaction has not been encouraging. We’re considering others.
Alex, I am not sure the membership thing is so bad. I voted on your poll for more plugins. Maybe the right format is not a membership scheme, but I don’t see why you need to ask, you could just do it and see if it works.
Paid plugins are an easy way forward. You already have the zem_event plugin which you could make into a paid plugin – by which I mean offer support and updates for those who pay for it.
Other plugins that would be useful:
- Membership management
- E-commerce or store
- Built in forum
- Better image management
- Multi-languages
Maybe others in the community can offer their own ideas.
An approved list of TXP developers (like EE) might also be useful for first time users.
Essentially, you need to give us a better way of supporting your efforts. The membership option is not very clear at this point, which may explain the hesitation on the part of the community.
Last edited by jstubbs (2007-04-29 09:28:14)
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#39 2007-04-29 12:31:38
- alexandra
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- From: Cologne, Germany
- Registered: 2004-04-02
- Posts: 1,370
Re: [feedback] Developers pay
zem schrieb:
We’ve been working for a long time on ways to earn an honest living building Textpattern. It’s difficult and frustrating.
By the end of the day, TXP is Open Source. To make a decent living on coding for TXP is full of dewy-eyed optimism. Do you know programmers who live on coding for OS? I don´t. Why do you not release one drop cash plugin after the other? Why did you not already code an eCommerce solution yet selling it? Now somebodyelse took this over. I don´t get your mourning… I never got 1$ for all my TXP contributions. Truth is i payed instead!
Besides TXP is not only developers … you are just a part of the game, but not the complete game itself. I probably should give this issue a seperate post. Some people seem not to see how much other people contributed … Code itself is a long binary in the first place and nothing more!
Apart from that, it seems selling VC plans with the offer to fund OS projects was nothing but a marketing trick by DA – at least it seems so to me. (I am no VC).
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Re: [feedback] Developers pay
Alexandra, I think what is remarkable is that it is not the developers who are moaning, or mourning, as you put it. It is the TXP users making themselves heard about the intentions of Textdrive, or more precisely, as you point out, Dean Allen. The developers just get on with it and keep doing a great job.
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Re: [feedback] Developers pay
Alexandra, I don’t think this thread is about the developers moaning or groaning, rather the main issue is supporting the efforts of those who contribute to TXP – developers, marketers, Text Book authors etc etc. Your own efforts are amazing, and well thought of.
I remember you organised a Christmas gift year before last for the developers and those who had worked hard for TXP – Stuart (bombsite) for example. That was a nice thing to do, but now it seems we need to do more, and the question is what.
We are also not happy that we paid for TXD hosting assuming that part of our money would go towards the developers of TXP – it appears this may not have happened, although to be fair, we don’t know TXD’s story. It did say “10% of profits go towards the developer of your choice” or something like that. Then, the question would be what if there was no profit – then no money would be owed to the developer in question.
I for one would like to see paid-for plugins and extensions, because then I might have a better guarantee that the plugin won’t be dropped like so many others. What about those plugins that have been paid for with ransoms and then dumped?
The developers have made it clear that they will keep TXP free and open source – they just want to find a way to make some money for their work. We should support this, just like we should support the efforts of those who have also worked hard, like yourself.
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Re: [feedback] Developers pay
jstubbs wrote:
What about those plugins that have been paid for with ransoms and then dumped?
If the license is free enough, there’s nothing to stop others from continuing development. That’s the beauty of free software.
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Re: [feedback] Developers pay
alexandra wrote:
By the end of the day, TXP is Open Source. To make a decent living on coding for TXP is full of dewy-eyed optimism.
I’d love to expand on this, do start another thread.
It’s been said that Textpattern is hosted for free, so that’s where Textdrive gives back. Well, I’ve been trying for the last couple of hours to reach this forum. Then I’ve had to wait on the server to post this message. There are many hosting providers that would give Textpattern a similar deal. Heck a nice VPS would cost $38 a month, that’s $456 a year.
On the PunBB Hosting page it states: By signing up at TextDrive and selecting PunBB in the drop-down “Software I’ll be using”, 50% of the profit go to supporting the development of PunBB. All we are asking, as enthusiastic users and developers, does this still apply?
We Love TXP . TXP Themes . TXP Tags . TXP Planet . TXP Make
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Re: [feedback] Developers pay
I’d just like to point towards this topic in the txd forum
Yiannis
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NeMe | hblack.art | EMAP | A Sea change | Toolkit of Care
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Re: [feedback] Developers pay
*Jeremie wrote:
Can the TXD customer around here check their old archives, to see if the others plans (including the first VC, and the later on similar offers) have the same wording?*
I can’t find anything in my old emails apart from: Thank you for subscribing to TextDrive Consider this a confirmation of your membership in the TextDrive VC200 – which means great hosting for as long as the company exists.
However, Smartys has posted some interesting links over at this thread
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Re: [feedback] Developers pay
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?
Yiannis
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NeMe | hblack.art | EMAP | A Sea change | Toolkit of Care
I do my best editing after I click on the submit button.
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Re: [feedback] Developers pay
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.
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Re: [feedback] Developers pay
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.
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