Hi Nyall and other commenters on the thread
Personally I think it makes a lot of sense to allow payment for plugins via
the official QGIS plugin repo. A couple of (maybe contentious) ideas:
* can we put an Apple-like commission split so that QGIS.org takes 30% of
money coming from it? That will let us fund Lova into the long term and
other eventual team members to be paid to maintain the plugin
infrastructure. That will enable dudes like me who do backend work
maintaining the plugins services unpaid and unseen can fade into the sunset
and professional staff can take over the duty of keeping the plugins
platform going.
* Having a commission will also cover the cost of doing the accounting,
keeping track of who is owed what from their plugin sales, accounting for
everything, bank fees and what-not.
* We need to make it clear that QGIS does not offer any guarantees for
plugins sold (or downloaded for free for that matter) from the plugin repo
* It would be great to also invest into other long standing issues like
having plugin reviewers (or a clever AI scanner thingy) to make sure
plugins play nice on people's computers
Personally I would also like to have a 'hard opt in' for the plugin
installer shipped in QGIS. The first time you use it, you would need to
acknowledge that the plugins you get from the store may vary in quality and
their security from awesome to downright dangerous. If you do not agree
then the plugin manager link to the plugins repo essentially gets disabled
and you need to hand install plugins using the 'from a zip file' tab in the
plugin manager.
Probably more contentious would be asking those orgs fronting their
commercial services with a free plugin to give us (QGIS.org) a commission
too for the upstream services they sell, but I guess that would be a) hard
to enforce and b) bring out the complaints big time :-P
Regards
Tim
On Sun, Feb 4, 2024 at 9:08 AM Alexandre Neto via QGIS-Developer <
qgis-developer@lists.osgeo.org> wrote:
> I would say, why not?
>
> Many other open source projects have opted by having "market places" and
> paid plugins (e.g. Blender, Wordpress). This did not stopped many
> developers to keep publishing free plugins, while allowed others to have an
> easy way to sell their work.
>
> Our plugin repository has now lots of plugins that are no longer working
> or with bugs because the developer no longer have the time or will to
> maintain it. Maybe if some of these developers could receive a compensation
> for their time this could change.
>
> Besides, QGIS is now very robust and offers so many functionality already.
> Opposed to the past where some "core" functionality was depending of free
> third party plugins.
>
> Notice that there are already paid plugins. Some need api keys to work.
> And other are being kept "secret" outside our plugin repository and they
> could be useful for many more people.
>
> All the best,
>
> Alex
>
>
>
> A sexta, 2/02/2024, 16:38, Régis Haubourg via QGIS-Developer <
> qgis-developer@lists.osgeo.org> escreveu:
>
>> Hi all,
>> I have been sleeping over this thread a bit.
>>
>> We already have a lot of paid plugins and in the psc we try to contact
>> vendors to have them aware of the GPL licence obligations. This is a lot of
>> manual work, and this does not scale up obviously.
>> Offering a marketplace in our plugin management system can be really
>> interesting, since this would give us a way to explain GPL obligations to
>> authors and offer them a place to advertise their products a lot better
>> than letting them deal with their own systems.
>>
>> That said, the same question for QGIS.org general funding and
>> sustainability also applies.
>> We have been having a better fundings this year thanks to marketing
>> efforts of Marco and Andreas, which allows us to consolidate some tasks,
>> but we still live on a very low budget compared to the size of the project.
>>
>> Ideas have been thrown about using existing marketplaces (Windows store
>> for instance) to collect regular incomes via notarized QGIS installers, but
>> this is not an easy move given that we don't have permanent staff to handle
>> with the administrative work this gives.
>> Developing our own marketplace for plugins could indeed be a way to let
>> users do a voluntary contribution to the project when buying a plugin, or
>> even trade a very small percentage on sales to maintain the platform. Most
>> payment associative tools I know always offer this possibility, I wouldn't
>> be shocked personaly.
>>
>> If we keep a mandatory link to a repository in plugin metadata, where
>> source code is available, I think we preserve users that can't afford to
>> pay. We might write down market place terms of use where we ask plugin
>> authors for fair uses (no ads, no illegal use, security rules etc, no fake
>> repository that would not really allow users to get the real source code..)
>>
>> And I agree with Alessandro here, having public sources availables will
>> still
