Comments on: Do we need a commercial market for Grails Plugins?

By: fabien7474

fabien7474 — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 23:33:06 +0000

Very interesting article and comments!
I definitely agree with Wanderson Santos about having SpringSource/VMWare maintaining the most popular plugin since they are “a critical aspect of the overall success of platform”. Concerning rewarding the author plugin, I don’t have a clue about the solution but I can say that if I use intensively a plugin and I am happy with that, I am willing to contribute for the plugin (either by money or by my development time).

By: Jeremy Flowers

Jeremy Flowers — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 19:22:44 +0000

I think that plug-ins should be free to use in a development environment in order to promote feedback and creation of a more useful plug-in and sometimes consolidation of plug-ins.
But as soon as they get used in a production environment, then a license fee becomes payable.
That way there is an incentive to maintain your code.

By: exdevfr

exdevfr — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 17:24:48 +0000

I see no hope in that. It’s already so hard for the typical customer to understand that maintenance of their app is not free. No new feature=no money.
So the maintenance of a plugin… For me it can only be a byproduct of a customer project. In my experience : focus is either on making money or innovating/sharing/enjoying … not both.

By: Benoit

Benoit — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:29:40 +0000

I don’t think the problem is yet to make developing plugin a money making activity, I just don’t think the framework as yet reach this critical size. At the moment we are all investing in the technology, for fun but also with hope that I will pay off at some point, when grails is really going to be a force in the JVM world. Until then, I’m not expecting to live from it, but I need my investment to pay off and people to get convinced, so I need a good framework and good plugins. And that, usually, don’t come cheap …

So, that’s a really interresting and important: how to keep people motivated when they know the financial reward is not for now ? then I had a vision: beer. Is it not what it’s been invented for ? how about motivating the best grails/plugin developer by offering beer or round of beer if they solve your issues? That would motivate a few. And then, with the beer, comes a better notion of reward, a better feel of community. I would personally (mark my worlds) pay a few beer to people getting me out of trouble or fixing a few issues which hurt me. I’m sure i’m not the only one.

By: doyle

doyle — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 15:52:52 +0000

It sounds good in theory.

Issues with the above:
1. Crowd sourcing is very political
2. Need a grails license model/plugin
2a. Spring source / vm ware should create a repo and get a cut 10% to 15%
2b. all plugins should pass some type of automated testing and/or be scanned for malicious code.
3. Like the app store i don’t think that support should be guaranteed. If you write an app that is really really good then you can price it higher because you won’t make any money on the support. Mr. Bloch said “API’s are like sex one mistake and you’ll be supporting it for life.”

Overall it seems like a good idea. The PHP guys do it we should to.

By: Marc Palmer

Marc Palmer — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:21:19 +0000

Rob – I don’t for a second think people should have to pay to try out plugins. I don’t even necessarily think everybody should pay for plugins – eg small individual developers shouldn’t have to pay.

I don’t think there’s any way to force the use of teams on plugins – some do have a team, but mostly its lead dev + contribs. Without someone with consistent responsibility over time for testing and release planning, IMO plugins will not thrive.

By: Robert Fischer

Robert Fischer — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 03:35:04 +0000

How’d you like to take over Autobase, Tomas? Drop me an e-mail.

By: Rob Fletcher

Rob Fletcher — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 12:55:52 +0000

This is really difficult. I really don’t want to be paying to *try out* plugins on my own toy projects. Tip jars are probably never going to adequately repay developers. I find limited time licences a nuisance as the demands of real life can easily mean you run out of time before seeing whether a product does what you need. Could a free for non-commercial use licence work? I’m not sure. At work we use almost exclusively open source software because a) the good stuff tends to be better and b) we don’t have bean-counters to deal with before we can use something.

One thing I really think would be a good idea is to have small teams of developers working on plugins rather than them being solo hobby projects. That way roadmaps can be managed better, developers can come and go but the plugin project can continue. It appears to me that very few if any plugins are developed like that.

By: Wanderson Santos

Wanderson Santos — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 23:42:07 +0000

Very insightful!

I can see that problem isn’t with new plugins, but maintain the most used ones…

So I believe SpringSource could embrace and maintain ($) those already most popular plugins, like Quartz, Searchable, and so on. These plugins, like Gabe mentioned, really are “a critical aspect of the overall success of platform” and consequently SpringSource.

This action will not only estimulate new plugins, but ‘great and useful plugins’ for the ecosystem.

By: Tomas

Tomas — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 23:25:57 +0000

I think it also depends on how attached you are to your plugins and whether the original author should be the only person making changes and maintaining a plugin. I think maybe if maintaining your plugins is becoming a chore, you might consider offloading them to someone who might still think it is exciting.

I would love to take over a plugin like searchable, Flex or spring security for a year just to really learn the internals of such systems and keep up to date with them. I’m sure I’m not the only one.

The reward of maintaining the plugin can be something other than monetary. Maybe we can use conferences like GGX, GR8 and Spring One as places where knowledge dumps happen. Something like this will ensure plugin longivity and would also prevent people from contributing plugins. Programs like Google Summer of Code might give a monetary incentive for this.

Of course, I would love to see companies like Adobe step up and sponsor development of plugins that promote their product.