[QGIS-Developer] [Qgis-psc] Theoretical discussion: A QGIS paid plugin marketplace? (was: sponsored plugin)

Wed Feb 7 11:54:44 PST 2024

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Hi all,

As a developer inside a very ESRI centric large public organisation, this discussion is very interesting. Pushing my organisation to donate to a plugin developer or QGIS.org is just impossible. However, paying a fee to download a plugin is easy to justify, as it would to pay QGIS.org directly for a direct support (that could be sub-contracted behind), after all, we pay a huge amount annually to ESRI for no real support... So having a marketplace where paid plugin can be bought could let organisations like mine to provide some support plugin developers.

I’m not sure if I would want this marketplace being hosted by QGIS itself and being access through the current Plugin Manager. I prefer the idea of QGIS being clearly free… but at the same time maybe it’s not that bad if there is a mix of free and paid plugin at the same place, as long as it’s very easy filter. The obvious benefit of a marketplace hosted by QGIS is that a small commission could collected as Tim suggested. With a separate entity managing paid plugins, there is no way for QGIS.org to systematically receive a small donation as Sebastian explained with the way it works with Blender.

Even for free plugin, I see a way to increase the chances of a developer receiving a small donation. A “Donate to Author” button could be added in the Plugin manager (on the left of the Uninstall Plugin button) and would be activated if the plugin author provides a URL to a new “donation” entry in metadata.txt . A warning would need to be displayed as it would send the user “somewhere” on the internet.

I also think that free plugin that require a paid service to be of any use should be flagged in a certain way.

Regards,

Jean-François Bourdon

De : QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer-bounces at lists.osgeo.org> De la part de Sebastian Gutwein via QGIS-Developer
Envoyé : 7 février 2024 13:27
À : Tim Sutton <tim at kartoza.com>
Cc : qgis-psc <qgis-psc at lists.osgeo.org>; qgis-developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>
Objet : Re: [QGIS-Developer] [Qgis-psc] Theoretical discussion: A QGIS paid plugin marketplace? (was: sponsored plugin)

I want to say that I would like to see developers being fully supported for their work on QGIS. As we know there are many ways to achieve this and paid plugins is one potentially viable and useful way. I have seen the Blender Marketplace mentioned a couple of times in this thread and I feel like it is important to point out that it is not in any way associated with the Blender Foundation or internally linked to the software. It is owned and managed by a for profit company CG Cookie. Blender does have quite a few add-ons that are included in the program but these are not allowed to be paid add-ons or even link to paid services or other paid add-ons. I have purchased add-ons from the Blender Marketplace and it works well and allows for easy downloading of updates etc. Other add-on developers use Gum Road for paid add-ons or Github for free add-ons. The Blender Marketplace has a function for a portion of the purchase price to be donated to the Blender Foundation to support Blender. Like QGIS the add-ons are required to be under the same licence as Blender and are therefore opensource. As far as I can tell the desire of the developer to have the plugin be a paid plugin is respected by the community but does allow for the option of a hard fork if circumstances require that.
Thanks
-Bas

On Tue, Feb 6, 2024 at 4:57 PM Tim Sutton via QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>> wrote:
Hi Nyall and other commenters on the thread

Personally I think it makes a lot of sense to allow payment for plugins via the official QGIS plugin repo. A couple of (maybe contentious) ideas:

* can we put an Apple-like commission split so that QGIS.org takes 30% of money coming from it? That will let us fund Lova into the long term and other eventual team members to be paid to maintain the plugin infrastructure. That will enable dudes like me who do backend work maintaining the plugins services unpaid and unseen can fade into the sunset and professional staff can take over the duty of keeping the plugins platform going.
* Having a commission will also cover the cost of doing the accounting, keeping track of who is owed what from their plugin sales, accounting for everything, bank fees and what-not.
* We need to make it clear that QGIS does not offer any guarantees for plugins sold (or downloaded for free for that matter) from the plugin repo
* It would be great to also invest into other long standing issues like having plugin reviewers (or a clever AI scanner thingy) to make sure plugins play nice on people's computers

Personally I would also like to have a 'hard opt in' for the plugin installer shipped in QGIS. The first time you use it, you would need to acknowledge that the plugins you get from the store may vary in quality and their security from awesome to downright dangerous. If you do not agree then the plugin manager link to the plugins repo essentially gets disabled and you need to hand install plugins using the 'from a zip file' tab in the plugin manager.

Probably more contentious would be asking those orgs fronting their commercial services with a free plugin to give us (QGIS.org) a commission too for the upstream services they sell, but I guess that would be a) hard to enforce and b) bring out the complaints big time :-P

Regards

Tim

On Sun, Feb 4, 2024 at 9:08 AM Alexandre Neto via QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>> wrote:
I would say, why not?

Many other open source projects have opted by having "market places" and paid plugins (e.g. Blender, Wordpress). This did not stopped many developers to keep publishing free plugins, while allowed others to have an easy way to sell their work.

Our plugin repository has now lots of plugins that are no longer working or with bugs because the developer no longer have the time or will to maintain it. Maybe if some of these developers could receive a compensation for their time this could change.

Besides, QGIS is now very robust and offers so many functionality already. Opposed to the past where some "core" functionality was depending of free  third party plugins.

Notice that there are already paid plugins. Some need api keys to work. And other are being kept "secret" outside our plugin repository and they could be useful for many more people.

All the best,

Alex

A sexta, 2/02/2024, 16:38, Régis Haubourg via QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>> escreveu:
Hi all,
I have been sleeping over this thread a bit.

We already have a lot of paid plugins and in the psc we try to contact vendors to have them aware of the GPL licence obligations. This is a lot of manual work, and this does not scale up obviously.
Offering a marketplace in our plugin management system can be really interesting, since this would give us a way to explain GPL obligations to authors and offer them a place to advertise their products a lot better than letting them deal with their own systems.

That said, the same question for QGIS.org general funding and sustainability also applies.
We have been having a better fundings this year thanks to marketing efforts of Marco and Andreas, which allows us to consolidate some tasks, but we still live on a very low budget compared to the size of the project.

Ideas have been thrown about using existing marketplaces (Windows store for instance) to collect regular incomes via notarized QGIS installers, but this is not an easy move given that we don't have permanent staff to handle with the administrative work this gives.
Developing our own marketplace for plugins could indeed be a way to let users do a voluntary contribution to the project when buying a plugin, or even trade a very small percentage on sales to maintain the platform. Most payment associative tools I know always offer this possibility, I wouldn't be shocked personaly.

If we keep a mandatory link to a repository in plugin metadata,  where source code is available, I think we preserve users that can't afford to pay. We might write down market place terms of use where we ask plugin authors for fair uses (no ads, no illegal use, security rules etc, no fake repository that would not really allow users to get the real source code..)

And I agree with Alessandro here, having public sources availables will still let a large audience to the payment system. QGIS' audience is so large.

All in all, this kind of system requires more efforts to maintain everything in place, and I would be in favor of growing up the budgets to have dedicated persons able to handle this, just like we already manage to do with documentation and infrastructure management (Thanks Kartozo, Lova and Selma, you do a great job)

In short, I would be in favor of going this way, but we need to handle this as it is: grow up QGIS.org core to be able to handle those tasks. And growing the budget is the first thing missing maybe.

Best regards
Régis

Le ven. 2 févr. 2024 à 02:01, Emma Hain via QGIS-PSC <qgis-psc at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:qgis-psc at lists.osgeo.org>> a écrit :
Hi All
The economics of this is very interesting.

As a community, we want to give something to our fellow members that they need. It allows for our creativity in scratching an itch, and sharing that solution. However, we can break the mold and work out a novel way to deliver. The open-source pledge North Road uses goes some way to doing this. Whilst there a lot of tools are within the licensed (paid) version, those tools are available for release once production costs are met. This enables the plugin to continue to deliver to those who cannot pay for the licensed version, whilst funding further work as technology organically develops or additional needs pop-up. Also note that the remuneration funds our support for the FOSS4G community, whether via sponsorship or applying resources on the committee. So the funding for the plugin gets recycled in the community, as well as going someway to providing a living wage.

Shutting out people from the use of desired services should not be what we are about - there has to be another way.

In regards to taking over a plugin, this is how FOSS continues, if someone is passionate about it, they can ask the creator to take it over. As part of the marketplace, the community should also have this as a service, a page listing the plugins that are not maintained or won't be maintained and is anyone available to take them over. This is a great way for up and coming developers to learn the craft from mentors.

Keep the discussion going - this community is so creative that I think we will come up with an option.

Cheers
Em

On Thu, 1 Feb 2024 at 22:33, C Hamilton via QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>> wrote:
Hi Nyall,

First, thank you for all that you have done over the years. You have helped me a number of times in answering questions. Open source software is an interesting beast. There is so much donated time without compensation yet people need to feed themselves. My first QGIS plugin was in 2016 and I now have 12 QGIS plugins that are published (several more that are unpublished), but I am facing a dilemma. My work has funded all my development except for one plugin which I did for myself. Unfortunately, I was never really able to break into the ESRI culture here and a year or so ago was told to stop doing further QGIS development and to focus on other research. I did not find something that I liked as well so I am going to retire (because I can) in May. So my dilemma is what is going to happen with my plugins. I care about them. I have an agreement with another organization to take over support but after the first meeting I have no confidence that they will be able to do it. I will probably still fix some bugs after I retire, but I am not all that interested in working for free. I want to explore new hobbies in retirement so any QGIS work would be minimal unless it also fits in with one of my hobbies.

I don't know how to get compensation in the open source world unless there is a company who is investing in and developing open source software. It would be nice if there were a mechanism for developers to get some compensation.

This is a difficult topic to address, but I hope something comes out of it.

Best wishes,

Calvin

On Wed, Jan 31, 2024 at 8:28 PM Nyall Dawson via QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>> wrote:
Hi lists!

I wanted to kick start a (hopefully!) civil, THEORETICAL discussion about the role of a paid plugin marketplace for QGIS plugins.

This has been on my mind for a while, and recently was bumped by this email to the list:

On Fri, 19 Jan 2024 at 19:38, gam17--- via QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>> wrote:
>
> Hi everyone,
>     like many of you, I have developed and maintained a plugin for many
> years completely free of charge.
> I have never received any donation or compensation of any kind and now I
> would like to find a solution.
> Has anyone already found a way to receive donations?
> I was thinking of asking for a sponsor that would be displayed during
> execution, for example in the window titles or through a specific menu
> item like QGIS does (in this way the sponsor would be much less
> visible).

So again, stressing that this is a THEORETICAL discussion, I'm interested in hearing people's thoughts on the potential role of a paid plugin marketplace for QGIS.

Here's a bullet point dump of where I'm currently sitting:

- 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!)
- In fact, there's already likely thousands of private, paid for plugins out there! I'm talking here of plugins made specifically for internal use by one organisation only. Yep, that organisation COULD make the plugin public/freely available, but in many cases they are specific to that one organisation's needs or contain organisation sensitive logic/data. These plugins are completely compliant with the GPL, despite being private and paid for by that organisation.
- 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. 👎
- 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.

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?

Nyall

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