[dokuwiki] Re: [Ad] DokuWiki Sync Plugin

  • From: Michael Klier <chi@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: dokuwiki@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 9 Mar 2009 01:34:25 +0100

On Mon, Mar 09, 2009 at 12:38:22AM +0100, Florian Feldhaus wrote:
> I back this. I would love to see a good solution to pay plugin 
> developers for good plugins. Especcially the WYSIWYG editor. But there 
> are more plugins out there I would spend money on, if only the plugin 
> developer then would implement the features I wish for in a given timeframe.

Well, have you contacted the developers in question ;)? 

As for my POV on what you've said: if someone wants feature foo in plugin bar
and opens a feature request for it, it's going to be implemented whenever I
see fit, after i get other more important things out of the way first, because
we all know that time is money, and even if some people don't understand this,
some of us do have real lifes ;P.

If however, someone is willing to pay money for a feature or even a bug fix
(yes, I've taken money for fixing bugs, but getting something in return for
2hours tracking down a partiluar problem "now" instead of "whenever I find
some time" makes sense to me), it's automatically going up the importance list
- charging money is doing business, doing business is keeping deadlines and
making customers happy.

As for Andis new plugin. I like the idea, there are other Open Source projects
maintainers who do sth. similar. Take Ardour for example, Paul Davis is
charging money to be able to work full time on Ardour and to feed his family!
I think this is fully legitimate, even in Open Source software, the freesound
project asked for money for a new server etc. etc.. Now Andi is trying sth.
new, after putting over 5years of time end effort into creating the Wiki
engine we all use + countless plugins (which are defining a code quality
standard when it comes to DokuWiki plugins) and giving support on the forums,
IRC and the mailing list. And to no surprise, there are those random unthankful
people which start whining on the first attempt of trying to get some money
for spitting out thousands of lines of code in the past years. And this is not
about getting rich, 750€ is laughable compared to what you'd pay a developer
normally who works on a hourly basis. I mean, look, I've wrote a vim plugin
for DokuWiki, it has around 600 lines of code, and on a yearly salary basis of
55.000$ ohloh.org estimates its value at 5.123$! The plugin of Andi, if it
works as advertised (of which I'm quite certain), can be of good use in
companies who use DokuWiki for their internal documentation and which have
different bureaus connected over VPN for example. I think it's probably worth
more than those 750€. If I could come up with something as useful as this I'd
probably look for myself if there would be a way of getting something in
return. But for now I'm happily maintaining those ~26000 lines of php/js/css
plugin code together with foosel without charging money for every feature
request or bug fix ;).

Regards,
        Michael

PS.: I'll hereby happily repeat it again and again and again, please don't top
post, especially not in threads where it already has been mentioned that this
is not welcome on this list.

-- 
Michael Klier

www:    http://www.chimeric.de
jabber: chi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
key:    http://downloads.chimeric.de/chi.asc
key-id: 0x8308F551

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