One of the greatest things about WordPress and the WordPress community is that the plugins and themes are all released under the GPL License but for some people this poses a problem, and I can understand why.
I think the GPL is great, and I think that the original authors should always get credit for their hard work, in the form of a link back to whatever site they want. I also believe that providing a service is much more reasonable when it comes to WordPress, but I wish there was a better structure to compensate the individuals that take massive amounts of time out of their day to create beautiful themes, and plugins for the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of WordPress users.
I am sure that if Michael Heilemann was given even just one American dollar for every five Kubrick and K2 installs, he would need to buy another apartment to hold it all. Think about that for a minute next time you complain about a plugin, theme or even WordPress, as the majority of the people that make the software work as well as it does, are doing so for free, using time they could instead be working on a project that would make them money.
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David has some very valid points on WordPress development and open source software in general. I’ll expand on the topic a bit by focusing on the WordPress plugins that Watershed Studio has released.
So far for the month of January the WordPress E-mail Notification Plugin has been downloaded 813 times and the WordPress Category Posts Plugin has been downloaded 101 times. So lets be liberal and say only half of the downloads result in the plugins being used. That would leave us with a total of 457 “in use” downloads between the two (not including people who download once and install in multiple places). You can do the math and easily see that even small donations of up to $5 from everyone that downloads and uses a plugin in any given month would add up quite nicely and encourage a faster development cycle and more responsive guidance. (For the record we’ve received a total of $5 this month in donations.)
Could the development cycle be sped up? Of course it could if you didn’t have to worry about paying the bills. It would be nice to have the luxury of doing something for “the greater good” most of the time, but the truth is that money does indeed talk. In our case new releases of our plugins have occurred either when we “get around to it” (downtime in which we’d otherwise not be getting paid anyway — which isn’t all that often) or people have came to us with sizeable donations in order to “free up” some time to work on a specific functionality.
But money isn’t everything and is *not* our motivational factor behind releasing open source software. When it comes to Watershed Studio, there are really two goals from doing so.
1) To give back to the open source community. Open source is a lovely thing and to be honest if it weren’t around we wouldn’t be anywhere near where we are today with the vast knowledge we’ve gained through picking apart other projects. And while we’re not working on the internals of WordPress, we’re doing what we can to add value to the software so they can be freed up to hone the core system.
2) Promotion. We honestly could not buy the amount of promotion we receive from people all around the globe. (A few examples: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]) Roughly half of all our traffic comes from sites like these plus through the major search engines for people searching for WordPress. This in turn gets our name “out there” and leads to projects. Thus that is extremely valuable to us because it does lead to helping us pay the bills.
So there is a brief rundown of Watershed Studio’s take on open source software. If you have the means to donate to any open source project that you use, please do so. And if you can’t donate at the very least give credit where credit is due. In the end it will keep the development ball rolling.