I’m finding more and more of these every week. Premium plugins at a price for the open source Wordpress content management system! What are my thoughts on this? Do I like or dislike the fact that people other than the Wordpress people themselves are making money off an open source project? I’ve put alot of thought into it lately. Because I don’t have a problem at all with Premium Wordpress Themes, as long as they are original. The problem comes from people who steal open source themes, make a few minor changes, then sell those themes at a cost.
The same thing could be happening with Wordpress plugins! For example, I came across this premium plugin recently, it’s called AutoBlogged and it’s a paid plugin that gives you feed aggregation capabilities. It has a lot of cool additional features on top of it as well. But what’s the difference between it and the free plugin WP-O-Matic? Well a quick glance at the two homepages will tell you some minor feature differences between the two. But overall they are pretty much the same.
Now i’m not accusing AutoBlogged of copying or stealing it’s code from WP-O-Matic. But i’m not saying it’s entirely not likely either. And it’s also likely that there are instances of this code hijacking of Wordpress plugins all over the web. If it’s happening with Wordpress Themes, chances are it’s happening with Plugins as well.
This is What Turned Me Away From Joomla!
What turned me away from Joomla, was that every time I would look for a “Component” for my Joomla cms I would run into “Paid Components” and I could never find a good quality component for free. This made no sense to me since Joomla itself was free.
Overall I must say that I do not like premium Wordpress plugins. I think they dampen the spirit of open source and the great community that exists around Wordpress! SOS. Software as a service. Go sell your services of Wordpress skills. Don’t sell us cheap little plugins and bind us to proprietary software tactics. The only reason Wordpress is around today is because it’s Open Source! Just remember that!
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Just for the record, AutoBlogged is completely original code and is no way taken from the many open source RSS aggregators out there. A quick review of the source code (we provide full, unencrytped source to customers) will quickly show that there’s a lot more going on with AutoBlogged than with the various free plugins out there.
We built our plugin around a traditional software business model because open source RSS aggregator plugins, while generally good quality, tend to be more hobbiest in nature, depending largely on peer support. We agree that it sounds shallow to take advantage of the free WordPress platform to make money on a product, but by charging for AutoBlogged we are not only able to provide personal support but we can also fund the development of new features which we are constantly adding. We also do things like purchase hosting accounts from a number of the large hosting companies that we use for product testing to ensure widespread compatibility.
Some people buy premium WordPress themes and plugins to be part of an exclusive club and distinguish their sites from all the others out there, but with AutoBlogged we do provide real value behind that payment. WordPress, too, has a business model: they provide the software for free and then charge $2,500/year for basic and $5,000/year for premium support. Obviously those enterprise support customers are the ones funding the great WordPress platform for the rest of us!
I have to agree. Especially when I look at the source code and see they are using stuff in their plug-in or theme that was all open source in the first place. If they do sell them, they should sell it for a $5 donation or something like that – not $97 as some of them go for!
Here’s my experience: My company publishes a free plugin called Business Directory for Wordpress. We have logged a corporate cost to this project of nearly $8,000. As an experiment, we wanted to publish a cool tool to the open source world to see what we could do with it. Our motives, to be honest, are commercial.
To start, we created a very nice web page that features a donation link to a PayPal account. You can see this at http://businessdirectory.squarecompass.com. While we are very grateful for the handful of donations that have been made, our total received after 2,000 downloads of our plugin is less than $50. Donations are not the way to go if you intend to cover any costs for development.
To get a quality plugin, you either need a developer who is willing to shell out some serious cash ‘just for fun’, or you need financing. Financing for most plugins seems to come from a paid development process where a customer pays to create a plugin, and then the plugin is released to the wild after the fact. This seems to work, however we have also learned that there can be an enormous number of requests, and even demands, from users who want something just a little different. I have been amazed at both the amount of verbal support (‘great plugin, thanks!’) and surprised at a limited number of demands from people who apparently think that we should be expected to provide for free. The Open Source community is generally understanding of the impact development can have on a budget, but we have discovered there are a few out there who have come to ‘expect’ service for free, without consideration for the thousands of dollars it takes.
Technical support is another area that we have learned much about; because there are so many customers, each with a different set up, we receive several notes a day asking for our help in installing or troubleshooting. We have documented a lot of things on our site, and most customers look there first, however many do not and we spend a lot of time helping people find answers that are already written in our documentation. This process absorbs more time and money, and forces us to reconsider just how ‘free’ this plugin ought to be.
My own lesson learned in this process: I no longer remove the footer tags built in by the developers of any plugins or themes I use. As a developer, we would often be asked by our clients to remove the ‘this theme provided by’ language at the bottom of a theme. We would unknowingly oblige, without considering that this would be the only form of payment to the guy who spent long hours creating something we are using for free. I have also developed a habit of contributing a couple bucks for developers who receive donations. Having done this myself, I now understand the pain someone else goes through to provide a ‘free’ plugin.
We are working on a commercial version of our plugin. The commercial version will be sold at a one-time cost, which will be used to cover the cost of the development. Because of the GPL license, we are required to rebuild the code for the new version from the ground up (and is evidence that AutoBlogged didn’t steal any code; they are not allowed by the terms of the license and could be in trouble if they did. Knowing this, I am sure they didn’t start out this way). This will take time, and money, but the resulting plugin will be very valuable to our customers. In fact; using our ‘Premium’ plugin will provide a way for our customers to make money on their blogs, and potentially recover many times the cost of our plugin.
We will continue to offer the free version, but simply HAVE to charge for the premium version in order to enable its development (development of our premium version could cost as much as an additional $8,000, not including the hours of support time we will spend with customers who can’t get it to work for some reason).
My bottom line: I am not sure why you are upset about people charging for their time and effort. If you don’t like what they have to offer; don’t buy it. If you use it, you should be willing to help them recover the costs it took to create it. The open source community is terrific, and I am proud to be a part of it. But let’s not create an environment where everyone expects everything for free; It won’t last forever if there is no consideration for the costs.
Developers have every right to charge for what they produce. I think it is a terrific model if a developer is willing to give away a ‘lite’ version of a commercial app. We should all take advantage of these opportunities, and be willing to pay for advanced features.
Don’t understand? Take the time to create a good open source plugin and release it yourself. It is a wonderful experience that will really open your eyes to the real cost of ‘free’. I did, and I’ve learned a lot.
…”The problem comes from people who steal open source themes, make a few minor changes, then sell those themes at a cost…. The same thing could be happening with Wordpress plugins!”
That is actually what I was talking about if you actually read my article. And this actually happens more frequently than many assume.
If you write code and publish it open source, the idea is not to make money from the code. But to help improve the code that is making you money.
For example:
If I open source a hammer, I hope that my hammer gets improved because I build houses. I don’t sell hammers.
People who open source hammers so they people will buy nails do not have ac omplete idea of how open source works.
Good point by Trevyn – open source opens up a project for participation and improvement, possibly leveraging much more power than any individual developer may.
It’s an interesting discussion, and a crucial one for the future of open source and “free” software.
As far as my understanding of the GPL goes there’s nothing wrong with redistributing it, as long as it remain GPL’ed, and there’s nothing wrong with charging money for this code. Noone says anybody should provide stuff for free, just because it is GPL’ed “free” software. What the freedom in “free software” means is that anyone who obtains the code also remains at liberty to redistribute the GPL’ed code and charge for it too, if he or she wishes to do so.
Please read the GPL FAQ. As Morten pointed out, any software licensed under the GPL can be re-distributed and charged a fee for it if anyone chooses to do so. Any plugin written for Wordpress is automatically GPL licensed as well, like a virus, so the same rules apply.
I could make modifications to Wordpress and then re-distribute it and charge people a fee, for example, and there is not a thing Wordpress can do about it. If you doubt this, go write to the FSF and ask them, it’s been asked a million times before and there’s plenty of information on the web already on this subject.
Themes, however, might be a different story, atleast insofar as CSS and images go.
If you write code and publish it open source, the idea is not to make money from the code. But to help improve the code that is making you money.
For example:
If I open source a hammer, I hope that my hammer gets improved because I build houses. I don’t sell hammers.