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

[Alessandro Pasotti]

Hi Nyall,

Thank you for resuming this topic, I remember when I made a similar
proposal some 10 years back and I felt like it was blasphemy in the
church.

Perhaps now times are more mature and I am very much in favour of
opening the official plugin space to various forms of paid plugins.

In a previous life, I have had  a very good experience and revenue by
selling my PHP plugins on the Joomla marketplace (they maintained a
plugin listing, integrated with the Joomla CMS admin panel, plugins
were hosted elsewhere and they didn't manage the payments directly).

All the plugins I was selling were GPL or AGPL, source code was
publicly available on sourceforge/github and (to my surprise) I've
never had anyone re-selling or publishing or offering downloads of my
plugins in the wild.

The Joomla marketplace was (I don't know if it still is nowaday) IMHO
a great success story: there were many large/complex paid or freemium
plugins with a flourishing ecosystem of small/middle software houses
behind them, they typically also contributed to Joomla core
development.

So, my experience is that GPL is not a problem and people does
understand that some developers have bills to pay and children to feed
and they are generally happy to contribute to a sustainable software
ecosystem.

Cheers

On Thu, Feb 1, 2024 at 2:28 AM Nyall Dawson via QGIS-Developer
<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> 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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-- 
Alessandro Pasotti
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