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

“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

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

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.

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

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.