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

[Even Rouault]

Hi Nyall,

<THEORETICALLY>

It would seem tricky that qgis.org both offers/promotes a gratis & FOSS 
"market place" (the current official plugin repository), and a paid one. 
That could be conceived, but if qgis.org would promote in some way the 
paid market place, this would create some expectation on the quality of 
the plugins proposed for a fee, and QGIS itself, which could create some 
tensions with users.

The theoretical question of someone buying a paid (GPL) plugin (or maybe 
just finding its source code somewhere) and making it a gratis plugin 
once it has obtained its source code would be quite untainable if 
qgis.org managed both market places. The spirit & letter of the GPL is 
that anyone can improve existing code and share it with others, so it 
would be a hard take to prevent someone from distributing an 
improved/modified version of a paid GPL plugin in the gratis repository, 
and obviously having the same entity managing both market places would 
be a conflict of interest.

I'm not sure if the non-profit status of qgis.org would allow it to 
manage a paid marketplace.

I was wondering about the connection between Blender Market, LLC the 
private company behind blendermarket.com, and Blender.org the OSS 
organization, since that could be an interesting situation with respect 
to trademark.

https://blendermarket.com/page/about brings interesting clues about why 
it's working:

- "The Blender Market is independently owned and operated and has no 
affiliation with The Blender Foundation."

but:

- "The Blender Market is a proud Corporate Gold member of the Blender 
Development Fund"

I don't know if blender.org has some sort of gratis plugin repo, or if 
not, more generally how they would welcome a code contribution in their 
software coming from OSS code from the paid market place... I assume 
they must have some policy on how to handle such situation.

All in all, I believe that such organization, with a clear separation of 
the .org and the .com as different legal entities, with a "win-win" 
relationship, would probably be the best solution if one wanted to 
implement that.

</THEORETICALLY>

Even

Le 01/02/2024 à 02:28, Nyall Dawson via QGIS-Developer a écrit :
> 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 
> <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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