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

[Nyall Dawson]

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> 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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