I have been thinking about this subject for some time now, but todays tweets got me thinking and I thought I’d write up a post to hopefully stir up some discussion.
Maybe I should start off by saying that i’m not a money hungry developer, but I think that we can all agree that even though we are working with an open source CMS, we have to make money some how some way. Of course we get paid when developing a customer solution, but it seems to me that things are a bit different when developing addons, plugins, packages, datatypes and everything else that has been developed by and for the Umbraco community.
Currently there are two packages available for purchase in the Umbraco store, and I counted 68 packages on our.umbraco.org today.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that so many people are contributing with a lot of great stuff that is free to install and use. I personally used Warren’s CWS package to get up to speed on Umbraco v.4 after not having used Umbraco since v.3.0.3. I think it is a great resource, but I probably wouldn’t have bought it if it was only available for purchase in the Umbraco store. No offense Warren 
I myself started a pretty big project (at least for a spare time project) by developing Google Analytics for Umbraco, which is open sourced and thus free for all 
I thought about different models for getting a bit of return on creating a fairly large project, but ultimately decided that it should be open sourced. Partly because Google Analytics is already free to use, so it seem to be the best incentive to make the Umbraco package free as well – even though it might have greater value for some. Another part of the decision has to do with installbase and getting the package out there – won’t go into details, but sometimes its just nice to share your shit.
Axendo, who have also created an Analytics plugin for Umbraco, have chosen to make a limited free version and a paid version, which I think is a cleaver thing to do. I hope the good guys at Axendo are not pissed of by me making my package open source and free, but hopefully they’ll still be able to sell their package, and they could actually use my source in their product should they want to do so in the future.
I would personally find it cool if someone would want to adopt my Google Analytics for Umbraco package, and I would encourage all Solution Providers and Developers to make some money on implementing the Google Analytics section in customer solutions. In my latest offer to a new client I included a couple of packages from our.umbraco.org, which I think will be a win win situation for all: the client will get some very useful tools (free) and we (the solution provider) got some extra hours in on implementation.
Making a package free, open source or paid is ultimately up to the developer. One might think that because the CMS is free so should the addons. Well, not necessarily! Take a great addon like uCommerce which will definatly not be free, this product has a clear incentive for customers to buy it. I won’t go into details about uCommerce but I would love to hear Søren’s thoughts on selling an addon for an open source CMS
Over the next six month I will be developing a couple of addons for Umbraco (got the ideas, just need the time), which will all be open source and made in my spare time. The main reason for these addons being open source is that the counter part or the part that will be integrated with Umbraco is also open source. I’m also hoping that the fact that the addons are free to install will help them spread and thus create a greater installbase. This could of course also be done with a limited free version and a paid full version, but I’m somehow not entirely sure that would work for the addons in question.
So how do I get paid for spending a lot of spare time creating great addons? Should I get paid? Isn’t the gift of giving enough? 
Well, a sponsor-an-umbraco-dev program would be great but I don’t know who would actually sponsor my work, so maybe selling support/upgrades/feature request implementations would be a better solution?
I personally think that when the good guys at Umbraco start selling the Forms module, it will make it easier for other developers to sell their packages, addons, plugins or whatever. Would also love to hear Niels‘ thoughts on this – do you think that Umbraco Corp. in a sense will lead the pack and in some way encourage customers/users to pay for addons?
When a customer sees what great stuff he can get for a reasonable amount of money he probably won’t have a problem paying for it even though he “bought” an open source CMS in the first place, right?
So what do you think? Do you feel obligated to open source your Umbraco package or simply make it available for free? Are all the packages on our.umbraco.org not worth paying for? Are you hoping that all packages for Umbraco will always be free to install and use?
Please share your thoughts, as I would love to hear what others think about this subject.
Darren Ferguson, you are one of the few people with packages in the store. What are your thoughts?
Tommy Poulsen, you are making a great addon with the PDF creator. Do you intend to sell this addon or contribute it as a free to use package on our.umbraco.org and why?
Other package developers: Do you ultimately feel it depends on the content/usability of the package whether it should be free or paid?
I hope I didn’t make this post too much about money, but rather what makes developers or solution providers choose to make an Umbraco package free, paid or open source and how they get compensated for their work (via implementation for example?).
Great article.
I think there’s a difference between ‘developer’ packages and customer ‘packages’.
Packages like ‘MultiPicker’, CWS and my XsltResult are aimed at developers. These will never sell, as developers would rather build them than pay.
However, Google Analytics, uCommerce, Axendo Form Builder are all aimed at clients and should have a charge for clients (but of course free for developers!).
I think the core team are moving this way by splitting Courier out of the ‘Pro’ licence into a separate product (happening soon!)
How successful are the commercial packages? Is it worth the effort to make a commercial offering?
Personally I’d rather get the feel-good of making the package and receiving karma than the commercials. However I’m full time employed, it may be different if I was freelance/small comapny.
Great blog post!
First of all we’ve encouraged commercial packages since CodeGarden ‘08 last year. Heck, the package repository shown for the first time at CodeGarden ‘06 had “price” as a property
However, from my (and now Umbraco “Corp”) view, I’ve learned that there’s a huge difference in the demands between a free package and a commercial offering. With the latter comes responsibility for bug fixes, quality documentation, polishing, etc. which easily takes up equal or more time of the initial development.
Another thing that developers tend to forget/respect/prioritize is the sales/marketing; some developers think that once a product gets a price tag, the sales starts coming. And while it might be the case for a 1$ fart application for an iPhone, it’s not as easy in a b2b segment like Umbraco. To make it worse, it’s often not the developer who decides where to spend the cash and some packages would might even compete with the developer by offering functionality that could be implemented by the developer. The smart developer would of course know that paying for the great package would be beneficial in the end, but some developers tend to want to make everything themselves if they get the chance – ever met those
But the final – and maybe most important – consideration even a commercial package doesn’t necessary comes with a price tag – the exposure and branding that comes with a quality package can be worth much more than potential license revenues. For instance the exposure you get with the analytics package (especially when it’s out of beta) where I’d assume that it’s installed on at least 50% of all Umbraco sites would increase your market value as a developer. Whether it’s for your employer or the personal of a freelancer – exactly as it has happened for the most active people on the forums.
Bottom line is that commercial packages are hard. But of course there’s a market – first to produce a Sharepoint connector for Umbraco for instance could have a potential killer. But anyone comparing the potential marketplace for simple package with the potential in the module dependent systems like DotNetNuke space would fail. You don’t need those modules – just look at your own implementations.
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An interesting post…
I for one and I think our general feeling here at The CogWorks is that it is a mixture of both.
Whilst we are a commercial entity and need to make money (as I’m sure we all do…i’m not sure we can all live on freebies forever) we understand the community side of ‘Open Source’.
We are more than happy to share packages for free that add to the core offering of the Umbraco system i.e. the Package that our Technical Director Tim Saunders added for flexible tree navigations and other such packages that can help the community and the application grow. This can only benefit us and indeed everyone. The better the platform becomes, the more we can sell, etc etc…
However, as demonstrated at the Umbraco UK day, we are investing quite a lot of time and money in integrating a full property management system into Umbraco for one of our clients, and we plan to do the same for some other applications we have in the pipeline.
Due to the amount of investment we have made, and the complexity and knowledge we have built up in that particular vertical market, it would be unfair to just give that away for free, therefore we would plan to make that a paid for add-on for anyone who wished to use it.
The application itself is integrated into the Umbraco backend, but sits alongside in a separate DB and codebase (correct me if I’m wrong Tim?)
So I think it does depend on the type of package created and the purpose…
Thats my 2 pence worth anyway…I’m sure there will be a number of different opinions on the subject. I look forward to seeing the general consensus…
Hi Morten
Quite interesting article.
Since you address me directly, I will try to answer. Possibly my background (and intentions?) for developing Umbraco addons and helping out in the forum is a bit unusual, as I’m full-time employed with 3D software development, so working with web-development and Umbraco is a sparetime project. I got introduced to Umbraco because of a sparetime website I “had” to develop. Being a professional software developer suddenly acting in a open-source environment was an overwhelming experience due to the amount of application, support and help I received from Umbraco and the community – for free!
I guess, a simple wish for “paying back” is part of the reason for sharing my stuff and helping out. And it’s always a nice ego-boost when people appreciates your efforts – I guess this is the karma-issue, and is probably not to be underestimated.
Since I’m creating a couple of non-commercial websites for free, and the organization I’m helping out is lacking money, free packages (or self-made) is what I’m going for. My hope for the future of Umbraco extensions is, that most addons remains free, especially all developer-related extensions (as Chris point out).
My PDF Creator (once finished) will definitely be for free. I never considered making it commercial, actually. But maybe in the future, if I get more time to develop large packages, I could consider commercial ideas also.
One issue not addressed in your article is whether a free package should be open source or just free binaries. Hmm, I have not really thought about what to do yet …
>Tommy
I think it is super that this topic is coming up. I also think there is an angle/question to this that is less likely to be discussed.
Is my code/package worthy to be shared?
I am certain that there is a TON of stuff that companies and independent developers have come up with over the past year that we are not even seeing. How do I know this? I am guilty of it myself. I think there is a hesitance to share code and functionality, not because one wants to keep it for one self, but for the simple reason that you’re not sure if it is worth anything to someone else. In some cases there is a clear line where the code satisfies a very particular set of requirements that is not likely to be utilized by anything outside of your application. However, in most cases I think it is a matter of “that already exists in some way/shape/form so why release yet another version”, or “my approach might not be up to par with how others would solve this”, or “I don’t want to infringe on Darren’s solution” etc. etc.
How is this problem solved? I am not sure what the correct answer is, but in some way it has to be controlled by a governing “body” of packages and utilities. We saw a glimpse of this recently when UmbImport, ImageCropper, and some other packages were made available in the repository (congrats to the developers). The problem is, it took time to review these packages and make sure they were “fit for fight” to be included as part of the (seemingly) core offering of Umbraco. This means that the burden falls on the Umbraco organization (which is already working hard just to produce a kick-ass core), to approve and mediate various functionality that is submitted (either as a commercial add-on or open source).
Outside of the above point, I think it is great that packages are being made available under commercial license. It’s a niche market for hard-core Umbraco developers and they should be rewarded for that development and contribution to an already outstanding product. Umbraco is still young, but as time goes by, adoption will increase, as will the need for complimentary tools and functionality that falls outside the “core” product.
I think there is definitely room both. But I do think that a package has to be something pretty special and useful to be useful paid application.
The Lite and Pro approach is really good. Offering a usable and useful version of the add-in free and then offering a Pro version with all the extra bells and whistles. UmbImport will be following this approach when when they release their Pro (paid) version later this month. (source: http://umbimport.soetemansoftware.nl/)
Offering Open source Packages to the community for free also has its advantages that it relieves the Developer somewhat of the burdens of having to support the code so actively. As soon as you commercialize a package you have to deal with support and response. This could turn a lot of developers off developing commercial packages.
For all who where at Code Garden I leave you with this final thought that is quite meaningful in terms of the decision making process for commercializing packages or not. Dare, Care, Share, Get Laid.
let’s not forget you could have pay packages that are also open-source
as most of you know… i am not a developer… but i have provided some low level freely available packages… i have also participated in donating to the umbraco project, and the imageGen project, and i have also paid for commercial license or pro version packages from PeterD — i don’t share this to get credit for paying for some stuff… i share this info to definitely support that there is room for all variations of this topic.
personally, i would love to see the pay packages flourish a bit… as that would hopefully take some heat off the casual package developers that like to share – i know that some people really beat up those of us that are kind enough to share our shit with ridiculous customization requests and a ‘do this for me and do it now’ indignant attitudes when they can’t get paid huge cash for what is made right out of the box
i believe as a community, we are a killer collection of individuals that are really good at getting things working — but maybe not necessarily great at polishing, documenting and creating commercial worthy deliverables as stated in an early post
definitely room for all levels though and i look forward to seeing the projects section growing.
just wanted to add my .02 cents here so i can get updates on new posts… this is a great topic, a well conceived post and i look forward to seeing where the conversation is going.
Interesting discussion.
My first and most important point is that no-one should ever hold back on developing/creating packages because they suspect it duplicates the functionality of an existing package (as Nik hinted at). I’d hate to think that I was somehow stifling creativity. Nobody in the Umbraco community owes me anything, If anyone thinks they can provide a better implementation than I have already provided then go for it! Either roll you own, or get in touch with me about collaboration.
This has happened a couple of times before, notably at Codegarden ‘09 Kim L demoed a Google maps package – to me this just provided the motivation to go and improve my own and make sure it was the best.
Admittedly it would be quite irritating if someone were to release a free version of something you were planning to sell, but that’s life unfortunately.
As mentioned above I do have a couple of packages in the Umbraco store but I’m withdrawing them as of today. I had a couple of people write to me saying that they couldn’t complete a transaction when trying to buy my products and when I tried myself I couldn’t either. This being the case, I have no idea how many packages I could have sold as I guess some people would have just given up.
I now have to decide whether to open up the commercial packages as free software or implement some kind of purchasing system via my own site.
To be completely honest the main reason for my selling the two packages in the store was that there was a pre code garden initiative to get the store working and stocked with some good quality packages. All I’ll say is that I kept my end of the bargain and provided some packages plus software to generate licenses (which is freely available in the projects section of our.umbraco).
In general I agree that most developers would build something themselves rather than pay which is why I tried to pitch products at a very competitive price point (less than a typical dev hour rate).
In terms of creating commercial packages I think there are three ways to go. Small simple packages, very low price. Complex, killer app packages which cost a bit more but would take developers weeks to complete. Lite/Pro versions – Get them hooked and they upgrade once they realise that your packages are irreplaceable.
Having said, I am at a bit of a crossroads. I’m deciding at the moment whether to continue with commercial packages, but also whether or not to continue with Umbraco packages at all. I’m becoming quite frustrated at all of the efforts I make for little or no reward.
Finally, if anyone has any doubts about the ethics of creating commercial packages for an open source project then don’t. Everyone has to make a living and no-one should be telling you how. The bigger challenge for you is how to get it to sell. Niels makes some excellent points about marketing and also about the people with the power to purchase often not being developers.
I’m disappointed to hear that transactions in the store doesn’t even work. Please be aware that we only provide the domain for the store to drive traffic, it’s a project that Paul Sterling/Motus Connect runs on his own.
Hi Morten,
I’ve created a few packages myself both free and currently in the beta phase of a commercial package (umbImport PRO). So I don’t feel obligated to always create free/open source packages.
I think that there are so many free packages out there to get recognition in the community, or package something up that they’ve used in a project. That is the same reason I started with the free version umbImport, content management dashboard, Macro Picker etc.
Also people are afraid to charge for packages since umbraco itself is free. Personally I think that is wrong, building a market place around a free/open source product will help the adoption of the product by bigger companies.
Building a commercial package is also a whole different process then building a free package. Commercial packages requires more testing, a stunning user experience, documentation and support. That’s why many packages intended to be commercial end up as free on our.umbraco.org. You don’t want to know how many times I’ve asked myself “why do I want to build a commercial package”. It’s also something that you don’t in your spare time like most of the packages are created, if you want to do it well. Personally I hope to sell a few licenses of UmbImport not to get rich but to allocate a few days/weeks etc of development time to improve the product, believe me I have ideas for version 3 already .
Now how do you know if you should build a commercial package? The answer is dead simple, if you create a commercial package that is solving a huge problem for a client and saves them a lot of time your package has a commercial potential. I don’t agree with Chris that a package for developers should always be free, since UmbImport PRO will primarily be used by developers /tech people.
I do think that now the Umbraco market is getting bigger and bigger, more and more quality commercial packages will be available. Also you will see companies that primarily focus on building commercial packages. Maybe CG09 was a little bit to soon for most of the “commercial” package developers but I think when CodeGarden 2010 starts at least 10 Commercial well sold packages are available from the Umbraco store.
Thanks for this excellent post.
Richard
Richard,
“I don’t agree with Chris that a package for developers should always be free, since UmbImport PRO will primarily be used by developers /tech people.”
I stand corrected. Your right, the scale and complexity of the task has an impact on developers. If the package is solving a large or complicated problem and can still be tailored to individual solution then, as a developer, I’d gladly pay.
Great discussion.
Chris
As a developer of a commercial package for Umbraco I have to say that I approached Codegarden 09 with a bit of apprehension as to how it would be received by the community. There’s no doubt in my mind that we’re creating a package, which people out there have a real need for, but I just wasn’t sure how a commercial package would be perceived by the established community. Would it be OK? Would we be seen as leechers trying to make money on the hard work done by others?
As it turns out uCommerce has been very well received by everyone we’ve come into contact with, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t get a pang of guilt from time feeling that we leech on the great effort put forth by the core team. This is especially true after Codegarden where I got to meet many of the community regulars, and later on Twitter where I see the great qualities of the Umbraco community again and again.
My feeling on the matter is that commercial packages are a boon for Umbraco. For us at uCommerce creating a package leads to a lot of supporting code, which we need to bring the product to developers out there. One of my personal goals is to give back that code to the community and in fact we’ve already done so by extracting part of our installer code and contributing it to the Package Action Contrib project on Codeplex.
I dedicate much of my spare time to lots of .NET community work in Denmark, and I simply don’t have the time to spend on petprojects any more. Being able to use my work time to create code, which I can give back to the community, is enabled by the fact that we’re creating a commercial package and earning our keep off of the core product.
Large packages like uCommerce serve as a test bed of APIs and extensions points as we leverage areas of Umbraco, which aren’t utilized to as high a degree as the main API surfaces used when creating sites. In effect we help increase test coverage of Umbraco. Also we have a vested interest in the direction of future versions of Umbraco so we’ll definitely be on the frontline for betas and even alphas because we have to know what to expect when we lay out the roadmap for uCommerce and set out to create new versions.
The fact that commercial package are starting to appear further shows that the Umbraco ecosystem is reaching a new level of maturity, which should help convince even more companies that Umbraco is a great product, which is worth their time.
Hiya guys I agree with everyone’s thoughts so far and don’t disagree with anyone’s reason to sell or not to sell, but I wanted to share my personal experiences/thoughts with CWS mainly.
I built a site package initially whilst working for an employer a few years ago whilst I was just started using Umbraco for an idea of having an off the shelf website we could sell and just brand/skin up quickly for small websites.
This idea didn’t work out so I decided to create another version that would replace or better the Umbraco HQ’s website wizard package that was out at the time. I decided that the version that the Umbraco team was good but it did not offer common functions/features that most sites want/need and that this could be used to help beginners to the Umbraco platform.
At the time I was a young just starting out developer and the last thing on my mind was trying to sell my package. As I thought I was just coming across from a front end developer into a more general developer role and that my code may not be good enough to sell and I just wanted to offer something back to the friendly community as everyone had been so helpful with getting me up and running with the product.
I have recently revisited the CWS project with version2 that came out this year and I have realised it has definitely raised my profile within the Umbraco community which is a great thing in itself and would be really beneficial if I was a freelancer, which could be more beneficial than just some money.
Looking back on the project I was thinking of a way if I could possibly make money with CWS and I was struggling for ages. I realised I couldn’t sell the main package itself as I wanted to keep up the regular installations of it to keep my profile up within the community but possibly instead rather pay for the package is to pay for an extensive document that would cover how all the parts of the CWS package is built for a beginners guide to umbraco PDF.
Unfortunately I thought about that idea quite a while back probably 5months or longer now, but this has materialised mainly because the lack of free time I have available to do this in. If I was a freelancer I would be working on this in-between jobs are coming in.
Another problem I face currently is the support aspect side of things, I get emails requesting support quite often and sometimes quite rudely asking for support immediately. If I was to put this package or any other package as a commercial I would feel more obliged to answer support emails and my limited time schedule currently wouldn’t allow me to do this.
In my ideal world I would love to have one day a month to work on umbraco pet projects but I know that is not going to happen. So in the mean time I will continue to develop/contribute where I have the time.
I hope this has added to the discussion and not gone off in a random tangent or just rambled but it was just easier to write down my personal experiences.
Warren
I think the one thing that deters small companies / amateurs from making commercial packages is the need to support them. Most people can accept a few quirks and short-comings in a free open-source product, but not so in a paid-for product. If you pay for something you expect it to work flawlessly and you can then demand they “fix it asap”!
Proper support means producing quality documentation, easy-to-use installers and providing phone/email support. Most onerous of all, though, is you have to provide upgrades and bug fixes when demanded and support it through future versions of umbraco. Given that most packages will have a great deal of dependency on the core product (of which a package developer has no control over), and sometimes on other packages, this is quite an undertaking. I guess many people just don’t want the hassle of providing this, especially if they don’t see a big return.
My two penneth worth.
I think that most people here recognise that it is up to the individual whether they charge or not and that is good to hear, it certainly means there is a potential market for paid packages.
The other point that comes across is that if you pay for something there is an implied step up in quality, features, ease of use and support. This tells me that really to develop and sell a package you need to be doing it on a commercial basis and that therefore the package needs to be quite feature/functionality rich. This may present its own problems as it may end up too expensive.
Thinking it through, Courier and Concierge are ‘packages’/additional functionality that essentially fund the core team to develop the core product. A very nice business model for open source software.
One last point, I think that to support a commercial package that is dependent on the core code is tricky and maybe the core team could extend the way they currently release alpha and beta releases to give ‘certified developers’ even more insight into the future roadmap (it is Umbraco Corp now after all
My final observation – what a great discussion this is so far, with none of the flaming and arrogance that sometimes occurs within open source communities.
Hey all -
Just adding my thoughts to this excellent discussion. As you may or may not know I have been an early champion of the idea of Commercial Umbraco Packages – and I remain a proponent for the need for more of these. To that end I started the Umbraco Store in hopes of spurring developers to release some packages as commercial offerings. This has been met with rather limited success.
Recently I have heard reports of failed transactions for purchases from the store. If these are, indeed, legitimate attempts to purchase a product that is thwarted by a failure on the part of the store – I sincerely apologize to both the purchaser and the developer. As many of you know, checkout failures are not uncommon, though certainly disappointing.
Based on an ongoing discussion and the current lack of support the store suffers from, Niels and I have decided to close the current Umbraco store. It will be reopened at some point in the future when there is a clearer vision and a well-defined support model. I look forward to that day, and hope it is soon, as I too have Packages to offer.
-Paul
I think that Nik made a good point about a lot of developers, like myself (I’m a freelancer), who are unsure of the quality of their code – is it good enough to release it? In my case I have done a lot of work in the past on stuff like importing data into Umbraco, Campaign Monitor integration, a shopping cart/e-commerce system, etc, etc. But I haven’t taken the time and effort to package any of this up and release it. Mostly it’s a once-off, custom solution that works well for my and my client, but that’s it.
One reason for not packaging up the solution and releasing it is that it’s already being done (in the case of importing data, and e-commerce). Another reason is that it works for me in this one situation, but it would take a lot of work to get it to the point where it’s a general purpose solution, configurable, future-proof and fully supported (by me). I just don’t have the time to do it as I’m too busy paying the bills.
In my case I don’t feel obligated to open-source my stuff – I just feel like it’s not developed enough to charge for (it works just fine, but it’s not general purpose), I don’t have the time to fully document and polish it, and I certainly don’t need the headache of supporting it. However, having a profile in the community is important and so I think if I were to release code to the community, I would go the open-source route, for example like Warren has done with his Twitter package. That way if other developers would like a starting point for their own solutions, they have it, and they can feedback into the project improving it for all. I get to contribute to the community, I get a little exposure through the our.umbraco.org projects section, the project keeps on evolving and improving – and everybody wins.
Hi All, thank you all for sharing your thoughts and contributing to the discussion – really appreciate it.
Let me just start off by elaborating on my reasons for creating and releasing packages: For one I like the challenge of creating something useful and something that would be beneficial to others.
Like many of you emphasize exposure is an important factor, and I would lie if I didn’t say that the exposure of creating a popular package is a huge factor, even though I’m full time employed — one could argue that it is more important for freelancers, but I find it equally important. As Niels writes it “would increase your market value as a developer”, which is important for me as I want to help shape the Umbraco-direction of Codehouse (my employer).
A tool to get exposure is releasing a free package, as I believe it will help it spread and thus achieve a larger install base, and the possible recognition in shape of karma points, and possibly seeing large companies using my package goes way beyond licensing sales. Of course this doesn’t put food on the table, but because I’m employed I have the privilege of making such a feel-good move (as Chris also pointed out in the first comment).
The reason for making my free package open source is a way of giving back to those who have helped the package spread or who have installed it in their own or a customers solution. Personally I think its only fair to do it this way, should I choose (for some strange reason) to no longer support a package (or if I fell of a cliff) that someone else can take over where I left off.
So, I don’t feel obligated to do so because Umbraco is open source, but I do so because I care about your and your customers solution, so that you have the freedom to change something should you want to.
If I made a commercial package for Umbraco I probably wouldn’t make it open source, but thats just me…
From what I read in the comments there seems to be a tendency to think that creating commercial packages can be a bit of a pain, because of the extra work that goes into making a commercial package, which I can understand. As many of you have pointed out, a commercial package requires a top tuned package ready to install, complete with documentation, support, future bug-fixes and the fact that you probably want to stay on top of future core releases and whether they play well with your package. All of this doesn’t seem suited for spare time projects unless you have a lot of spare time
This being say I would (again, like many of you) also like to see commercial packages flourish. There should be room for packages in an Umbraco Store, which are of higher quality then many of the free packages you see on our.umbraco.org, but also (maybe) not as comprehensive as the uCommerce add-on.
I really hope to see the Umbraco Store stock up and sell some quality products in the feature. Should make for a nice sales window for the light/pro packages out there.
The possible complications of creating a commercial package as a single individual got me thinking about a thing, though. Will we see that commercial products will be limited to solution providers and their customers? Solution providers usually have the resources to create and sell commercial packages, but this might be limited to their customers as opposed to the dev-2-dev that we see in the community.
I’m not sure whether this is a problem or not? This is pretty much what is going on in the Sitecore community – the case of developers developing everything themselves (as Niels wrote). I think that almost all Sitecore solution providers have their own (i.e.) Forms Module…
Would it be an idea to create a solution provider package showcase on umbraco.org or our.umbraco.org – similar to the “sites running Umbraco”-page? I’m suggesting this partly because I don’t see solution providers putting their packages in the Umbraco Store (don’t imagine they would). This would of course not be very productive if ALL solution providers made their own Forms and Statistics packages, which they showcased…
Maybe it should only be products like uCommerce (that are not sold directly to the customer but through a partner) that are showcased, so potential customers become aware of the great additions that are available for Umbraco.
One could argue that its up to the solution providers to promote their packages themselves, so not really sure. But now the idea is out there…
And a question for Adam and CogWorks: Do see CogWorks selling developer licenses for packages created by you guys? – Could very well be that you would prefer to sell directly to the customer and do the implementation yourselves, but do you see this happening?
Hope this comment wasn’t too much of a rambling
Great input – we wouldn’t do showcases for packages. Promoting 3rd party packages is not something that’s on our list (at least for 2009) and as we’re producing packages ourselves there’s also the risk of having conflict of interest.
Yeah, thats true. Seems I forgot about the upcoming packages from Umbraco Corp.
I guess there is always CodeGarden to showcase commercial packages