[QGIS-Developer] Theoretical discussion: A QGIS paid plugin marketplace?

[Greg Troxel]

Nyall Dawson via QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org> writes:

> I wanted to kick start a (hopefully!) civil, THEORETICAL discussion about
> the role of a paid plugin marketplace for QGIS plugins.
>
> - Yes, I'm aware that plugins must be GPL, and that this makes paid plugins
> a little trickier in that they're obviously still subject to the GPL.
> - The GPL does NOT prevent charging for software, or mandate making it
> public to non-paying customers. We could potentially have GPL plugins which
> are only available to paid users, and only make these plugins available
> privately to those users. YES, the GPL **DOES** mean that those paying
> customers can redistribute the plugin publicly and freely without issue if
> they want (and regardless of whether the original developer wants!)

Are you envisioning that this paid marketplace would provide sources at
the same time it provides binaries?  I would think it would have to, in
order to be really compliant.

Would you envision any social pressure for recipients not to publish
plugin sources?  I would say that even a little pressure would be
totally inappropriate.  One way around it would be to require that any
plugin have published sources before acceptance.

While you rightly point out that QGIS being GPL imposes a requirement
for plugin licensing, there is also the point that plugins would not be
possible without the base and we need to view this entire discussion
within the larger context of the social context of free software.

> - There's nothing preventing a public GPL QGIS plugin from depending on a
> subscription based back-end, and offering zero value to anyone not paying
> for that backend. And there's a growing number of these plugins, which
> depend on users paying xxx large corporate entity regular high fees to
> access the backend service. The GPL doesn't (and arguably
> shouldn't) prevent these large entities from making money off QGIS plugins.
> - But this means that the current situation is unfairly weighted toward
> these large entities! A one-person team making an excellent plugin and
> providing an awesome tool for use in QGIS has a MUCH MUCH harder time
> finding ANY financial compensation for their efforts! I don't like this
> situation at all, and I'd say it goes against the "spirit" of why QGIS was
> made under the GPL in the first place. The big corporate entities win, the
> smaller community focused developers lose out. 👎

I sort of see your point, but not really.  Here, I am guessing that you
are mostly not talking about a situation where the value is the plugin
code and it is being unlocked by a fake subscription.  I suspect that
the real value is in the data available by the subscription and the
plugin is just plumbing to access it.  And that if someone else had
similar data, using the plugin as base code to access that other data
would be fine.

Or am I misunderstanding?  If so, the nuance is probably helpful to the
discussion.

> - Despite the fact that a paid user could freely re-distribute a paid-for
> plugin, there's still potential financial gain for the developer in making
> a plugin available for a charge on a theoretical QGIS plugin marketplace.
> - The blender market is a great example of this. There's LOTS of GPL
> blender add ons available there at charge. Eg
> https://blendermarket.com/products/hard-ops--boxcutter-ultimate-bundle?num=2&src=top
> as one example. If those numbers are accurate, that developer has sold >35k
> copies of a GPL licensed add on at $39 each. I'm going to go out on a limb
> here and guess that that developer's motivation to make their add-on
> excellent is considerably higher than the developer of an equivalent QGIS
> plugin 🤣 (not to mention that their time investment is much more
> justifiable). And any ONE of those 35k paid users could have made the
> plugin freely available for everyone else... but that hasn't stopped the
> sales.

In this case, is the source code really not available to the public?
If not, with 35k bought copies, then it's hard to believe that there
really is compliance, just from a statistical priors viewpoint.

> So what does everyone else think? Would there be a THEORETICAL place for a
> THEORETICAL paid QGIS plugin marketplace somewhere in the future? Or is
> there a better model we could (theoretically 🤪) follow to financially
> reward plugin developers?

How (and why) do you separate plugin developers from
  contributors to the core code
  contributors to docs
  packagers
  a bunch of other categories

?