I don't think it's fair to really compare c5's business model to the likes of google and youtube, since both of those companies started out with multiple rounds of venture capital, so they didn't have to worry about trying to pay their bills, and could just focus on capturing market share as quickly as possible. It took google years to become profitable, and they didn't even have a business plan for the first couple of years. I still don't know if youtube is paying for itself yet. c5 in comparison is completely bootstrapped and is currently funded mostly from doing client work. personally I think that the flood of venture capital in the IT industry has been sorta bad for it, cause it has given the unrealistic expectation that everything digital should be free, and that business models don't matter. it's ridiculous that people are willing to go out and spend $20-30 dollars on a good dinner and then they make a huge deal about having to pay that amount for an add-on (something that takes a lot more time and effort than cooking up a meal). but let's say you're right for a minute, have you got any other realistic suggestions for a business model?

as for the blog, the blog app in there was developed by some community members, and they decided to charge for their time and effort. but the truth is that you don't even need that addon to make a blog in c5. You can create one easy using free addons like the pagelist for the main blog posts page, guestbook for comments, and then other addons like addThis, etc., which is how I'm running my blog.

You are right, Google and Youtube had funding and weren't profitable, but they also employed 100's of people. C5 does not need that kind of funding to flourish.

And you are really ignoring the way more important comparisons: Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, osCommerce, etc. These projects did not have funding, they did not charge for plugins, and they flourished and took the market share of many products that DID have funding.

As for a business plan, I do have one. It's the same successful plan that all free and open source products have these days (and I believe I hinted at it in my last posting). Provide the software for free, charge for hosting, support, customizations, client installs, and other "services".

I've released many plugins and addons in my time (for Drupal, phpBB, LifeType, OpenCart) and yes they have taken me hours and days, but I have never charged for them. I'm currently developing an online music distribution system. This will probably take me a total of 1000+ hours to complete. It will be free and open source as will any addons.

But in the end this stuff doesn't even matter. If C5 had even 1/6th of the number of free addons available for an app like Wordpress, it would easily knock it's competitors out of the water. The reason apps like Wordpress and Drupal continue to keep the market share is because just about anything you want to do with them has already been done and is available in a plugin. If your addons cost money, you just aren't going to attract the kind of developers that will create 100's of addons. The kind of developers who do spend 100's of hours working on this stuff and then giving it away. These are the folks you need on your side because they will make or break your product.

And I'm not saying any of this because I personally want to install some addon for free. If I was in need of some particular functionality, I would just write an addon for C5 myself. I just feel like I stumbled upon a pretty ground breaking product and it pains me to see that in it's current state it's never going to hit the big time.

Or maybe I'm wrong...

I mean seriously, just look at this:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/...

6,812 plugins. No money exchanged. It can happen.

(Please don't confuse me for a Wordpress fanboy, I'm actually not a fan of Wordpress used as a CMS)

Just removing the the paid stuff is not really a suggestion for a new business model imho.

1. There's quite a big money exchange. There are some serious investors connected to wordpress
2. It took a while until the 6812 were written..
3. They host lots of blogs and have lots of visitors. This would make it possible to get money using ads.

-> Possible business model: Host free (but not ad-free) websites..

Just asking them to release stuff for free is not really helping to come up with a new business model.

I'm not saying you're wrong. Having the spirit of "free open source software" would definitely help c5 to get bigger and more popular but I still haven't seen a serious suggestion for a better business model to make sure the core team can make a few bucks...

I think you are looking at it backwards. The reason wordpress has lots of visitors and can be ad supported is precisely because they have 6812 free plugins.

No matter what C5 does, it's going to take time to become a competitor. Yes 6812 plugins takes a while, but it's going to take even longer (or perhaps never get there) if you don't have the community support and the developers. The developers who coded 6812 plugins for free for wordpress are clearly the type of developers you want and are also clearly the type of developers that are happy to make their code available for free. I mean, it really speaks for itself.

You've got a great business plan right here:http://www.concrete5.org/services/...

Now all you need is users and lots of them. Create the free addons and they will come.

Even with free addons it will take more time to make money..

Franz has to people his crew right now and not in 2 years.

The open source business model is not about free software, it is about open code, sharing what works and building better applications. The GPL does not stipulate how much you can or cannot charge for or to what extent you can charge.

Wordpress, Joomala, Mambo and Drupal are massive community programs that involve thousands of developers of which each of these have external funding sources. Those programs did not have a warehouse of end user before they had a solid core application at considerable time and cost to themselves. Does that make free better, no it doesn't. Not all free software is best of breed yet and that IS why you haven't seen a mass exodus to free and open Operating Systems.

Joomla, Drupal, and Wordpress as well as their branches, I find are really over crowded and really bloated. Not everyone is going to be interested in an application packed with 200 modules. Just because those modules are there doesn't make the application better, in fact experience in floss has shown that having too many options as part of the core application only confuses new user and inexperienced users. How many of those 6000 modules are actually used and maintained ? Probably less then half, because many of them are not best of breed and those unmaintained options only work to create more confusion and more problems.

The goal in building open and free software is to build best of breed applications that can eventually replace existing options with more flexible and modifiable systems to build more expansive and inclusive applications on. Even with that in mind, there has to be a source of income for developers, if this is their bread and butter. That typically comes from add-ons, customization, and service offerings. There is very little to be had from the distribution of an open core application or OS package.

Content Management Systems are designed to do one thing, allow inexperienced, or knowledgeable individuals to manage content. That HAS to be the core foundation in building the core application. Everything else is fluff that makes the deal sweeter, but just like your ride those sweet add-ons are not free and why should they be. Developing modules and customized features are outside the confines of normal application development.

That's my .02, I don't have a particular posture on it, I am for "what works," if that means spending so money and helping someone feed their family, then so be it. It is one less thing to worry about in the day and I know that I CAN use it how I CHOOSE to and not as part of set of unmovable package.

It just doesn't matter what's fair, who deserves what, what your time is worth. I'm not talking about any of that. Yes, we all need to pay the bills. Somehow me and many many developers like me find a way to both charge clients for custom work and release free software.

My argument is simply this. If you want C5 to become the next big CMS, the CMS that takes down all that bloatware, you've got to make it (developer) community supported and you've got to attract an incredible number of users. I believe (and the proof is all over the web) that having paid software (addons) involved in your otherwise free application makes the former difficult and the the ladder impossible.

And I know the difference between open source and free software, I got that lecture in 1994 or something (you'll notice that in all of my posts I refer to "free and open source").

First of all, Ibasically agree.. Even if it possible to create a blog with C5 without the blog addon, it takes more knowledge and if there's a nice looking addon, people will want to use it but if they have to pay for it, a lot will stop looking at c5.

I also agree with Tony. Comparing Google, Apple and Concrete5 is a bit <whatever> (Don't know the proper english word :)

If you looked around the forums (and maybehttp://www.codeblog.ch) you probably saw that I'm releasing my stuff for free because I like it to be free.. Why can I do this? Because I do other stuff which pays my bills..

Just telling the c5 team they should change their business model doesn't change a lot. I would love it to see more free addons but since I can't come up with a better business model, it's okay for me...

Make some suggestions instead of just telling them it's bad what they do!

I don't mind paying for some else's hard work.

I do mind that work not being well designed.

I also think there should be boundaries for addon pricing.

C5 truly is great, but I can tell from experience, the Dev team is not interested in this conversation or open to re-thinking anything in regards to marketplace pricing.

My hope is that all that will change as more and more people develop free/cheeper addons.

the CMS in and of itself however is fantastically simple and makes Joomla look like Windows OS.

Why not create your own for free if you need a module?

I first "C5 to be less of a theme" I thought.
But I "C5 to be less of a theme" Do not complain about
Create a theme has been released instead.

so many people are clamoring about saying that things should be free, but very few are actually taking the time to contribute stuff, and when they do it's often incomplete or buggy. Unfortunately this really slows down the rate at which we can add them to the marketplace (apologies to those who are waiting to have their packages added). Hopefully though there should be a system in place pretty soon to automate marketplace submissions.

bottom line, if you strongly believe concrete5 should have more free add-ons, then start developing some and contributing!

seths:

Look at it this way, your students might be able to spend some time developing an add-on and make some money - possibly even have a career.

blindmanwalking:
"the dev team is not interested in this conversation" holy-moly dude the other thread you started got an endless amount of replies from me, the CEO. Felt like I was writing a novel over there, I only shut it down because it was going no where nice.

anyone:
I'm all ears. You tell me. I'll be honest, I'm hundreds of thousands of dollars behind where I should be at this point in my life because I decided to give software away for free. I have a family. Every morning I have several hundred emails in my inbox looking for answers to questions. Is it flattering that many of them start with "omg this is so much better than every other CMS?" Yes. Does it make me feel any better when I look at my two children and wonder how I'm going to send them to school? Nope.

Does it even help any of you? When the complaints are "your documentation needs improvement" - whelp, it don't write itself. When is concrete5 gonna do this? When is it gonna do that?? Why does anything cost money - dude. I feel like I'm running romper room here. It shouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that we do need to make money. If there are any young software developers in school reading this - be warned, you're gonna need to make money in life. The idea that you're gonna have some awesome idea, and a guy in a porshe will hand you a check with no business plan or expectation of 20x payout in 18 months is just .. well.. .. not very likely.

So I've said it before, and I'll say it again - give me a model that works and I'm happy to look at it.

I am not interested in having a 100 person development team that grabs all the good services work around my product. I am not interested in getting to a point where my staff just ignores these forums because the "free" nature of our project is just a promotional tool for our huge services shop. So please don't tell me - your business plan should services, because I was /doing/ that before we gave c5 away for free, AND we got license fees out of it.

I am not interested in "Asking for donations". I think that's pretty cheesy. I'm not a bum, I chose to give you this stuff I'm not doing it with a look of guilt out of the corner of my eye.

Hosting is not bad. I think you'll see us focus on offering seamless hosting more - kinda putting us closer to squarespace but open source.

Training & certification is important, but it takes a lot of cost to get to a place where that makes you money (writing manuals, designing courses, etc) - I don't think we have the runway or frankly talent on our team to do that right at the moment.

So what's left? That's where we got to add-ons. concrete5 is a great starting point, but we designed it to do 80% of what you need not 100%.. There was always going to be a need to do add-on development, and since we're talking about open source I'm not sure why I have to pay my developers to write them all. It seems to me like if there's a huge community of people wanting to write stuff, they should be empowered to do so.

Here's where I think the big disconnect happens. Writing software is not easy and it takes time. Any web developer knows that. What I think you miss unless you've done it is /realeasing/ software takes time and money too. /supporting/ software takes time and money. The reason Remo isn't "against" add-ons costing money is he's started to have the experience we do. You give something away thinking people will be appreciative. They are. Then they ask questions. Since you GAVE it to them, it feels particularly lame to everyone to say "well you gotta PAY me to answer/fix that" but the reality is, there's only so much time in the day. The more you give, the more people take. Whatcha gonna do?

Charge a nominal fee for the parts that not everyone needs.

And it /is/ a nominal fee. The blogging app is priced at $55 because concrete5 is not a blog. You want to go blog for free, wordpress is neeto. You're building a site for a company where the CEO says "i think we need some blogging!" go ahead and set aside $55 for this add-on. As much as blindmanwalking thinks 'its a joke' (from other thread) I can tell you even a small company looks at paying a one time fee of $95 for ecommerce and it barely registers on their radar.

So that's the thinking. I'm perfectly happy to have a conversation about it if that's what we're doing. Maybe I'm missing something. If you wanna be helpful, go figure out how modx makes money. If you want a comparison, look at dotNetNuke, they're the closest to our business model I've seen.

If this thread turns into anarchists whining about why anything costs money and name calling, I'll shut it down too. I used to believe in anarchy too, then I turned 17.

I'm not an anarchist, I didn't even think it was a good idea when I was 17.

And everything you are saying makes sense. It really does. And I have released free software. I know about the hours spent and the emails and all that...

But really I'm not arguing about if you should or shouldn't get paid for your work. Of course you should get paid for your work. Of course you should be able to send your kids to college.

All I'm saying is look around you. The most successful web products and web applications today are free. They are free and their plugins are free. Does the current "free software" paradigm totally suck for software developers? Probably. But that's the paradigm, you said it yourself. So I will state it one last time. If you want C5 to become huge, make it ALL free. If you want to make six figures off C5, make it ALL free and in two years you'll have more hosting/custom mods/customization/services clients then you can handle.

I'm really not trying to start a fight here. I'm on your side. I love your product. I've been a web developer for 11 years and I know what it's like out there. I teach for a pittance and spend the rest of my time writing free software. Maybe I'm the idiot.

(PS You are totally right about most companies not giving an F about $55 bucks for a mod, but they also don't give an F about $500 for a custom mod that is then released to the community for free...)

here's what i've figured out about the business end of these other shops:

Drupal - actually it doesn't make money, thats probably why the project is bloated and the marketplace is full of things that break each other. You can have 6k add-ons or whatever the number is, but if installing more than one breaks your site, you've failed for anyone who isn't already a drupal expert. Acquia raised 15m in funding last year in two chunks to try to solve this. Basically to reach the promise we're making of a marketplace of add-ons that actually work. They haven't delivered yet.

Joomla - haven't a clue.

Wordpress - DOES make money, from what i've been able to gather, not from the $500/month hosting they offer folks like CNBC but amazingly from the ads on wordpress.com. They have all this content being made for them and they can clump it together with targeted ads on the top few pages of wordpress, and from what i've been told that pays the bills handsomely. Not so handsomely that they didn't raise 47m at the end of 2007 and call it a "small investment" however.

modx - got me, i'm guessing project work.

magento - technically not CMS, but similar problem. They were bell of the ball last year cause they were an open source ecommerce system that didn't suck and was free. The reality this year is that magento feels pretty bloated when you get under the hood, and now theres an "enterprise" version that starts at $9k/year. To me, that's the kiss of death for the free version.

dotNetNuke - similar model to us, MIT license on the core, add-ons cost money. I think they did experience a race to the bottom in terms of pricing and now there are 3rd party site selling stuff for the platform. I don't know how the core team is doing, but I still hear of the project.

If anyone can fill in holes in my understanding of business models here, that'd actually be really helpful.


now to keep in the spirit of open source... our services page was mentioned - here's how /we're/ doing:
host with us - that works well, we're gonna do more of that. in the big picture this scares me a little because there's really no IP here and its also a race to the bottom with godaddy and bluehost, etc.. still, we do own concrete5.org so its possible we turn into a hosting company with a brand based competitive advantage... its not the best feeling plan ever, but it might make some money on the way.. at least its already working.

Owner support - we've only sold a few of these plans and they scare me. The line between "concrete5 died" and "what's css" is pretty blurry for a lot of site owners, and I'm not really interested in having a warehouse full of production programmers removing MSO styles from sites clients cut and pasted from Word in.

Site install - this is horrible. Generally most of the form submissions i get there haven't been able to follow the basic instructions to get a phpInfo call on their server. When we do get one that looks doable, its still a crap shoot as to if we're gonna run into some weird server issue we need to debug. As these are fixed install fees (used to be $95, then i bumped it to $125) we often end up LOSING money because I feel like a chump taking someone's cash and 4 hours later telling them their server needs upgrading somehow.

Hire us - yup, that's how we pay the bills today. And that's how I payed the bills (much more effectively) before I released c5 under MIT. Services shop != software shop, for many many reasons.

incidentally,... is starting to work. We make a few hundred bucks every day, sometimes more. It's an awesome feeling to wake up and have both happy customers AND money in your in-box.

I can't really argue with that. It's making you money and that's awesome. I guess I'm just worried that it may stop there, and eventually fizzle back out. It would break the tiny heart of the nerd hidden deep inside me if C5 didn't make Drupal a thing of the past. I'm honestly sick of being asked to work with that behemoth.

You and me both. I have nightmares ;)

It's not actually making me money. We generate revenue, but to be honest - today it costs more to run concrete5 than it pulls in. To some extent that's my fault for saying "lets go build ecommerce" instead of just sitting here the dark with Andy trying to eek a small profit out of what we're doing today... so how do you continue to grow the project in a healthy fashion? gotta make some money somehow..

believe me, if i could make it all free, i would. Show me that investor with the porshe and vision to cut us a check for no promise of return because we've made a better toaster. Happy to have a chat with /them/!

;)

Was just trying to shed this thread from my head so I could get on with my week and had this thought:

None of the examples given are actually free. They may be less cost to you, but it's not free. Google gives you all sorts of stuff without an invoice because advertisers pay for that relationship you have with google. It's not free, you're just not the one paying the bill.

Craigslist DOES charge for postings, and in-fact they tried to do it more in the late 90's with a sister brand and found it didn't sit well with them or their audience. They now charge as little as they can to get buy, and their own development really shines because of it. (this is sarcasm) I dig the idea of keeping it simple, but common Craig, lets try something new occasionally - might keep the hookers off your site.. Regardless, employers and realtors in big cities fund YOUR experience on craigslist.

YouTube is a problem, it's not making money for google yet because no one has figured out how to successfully monetize video with ads. You can bet that smart people are sweating blood worrying about that right now. Look at the annoyingly disconnected floaty ads on videos in there now.

Wordpress actually was a side project. The creator ended up going to work for CNet after launching it. Only when it started to grow did Phil Black come along and give them the seed money to focus on it. That got them to the scale where they were cash-flow positive and they they raised another 43m for world domination. Wordpress isn't free, a very rich group of people have bought your copy for you. Wonder what they might do or not do with it next? Makes ya think, eh?

Nothing is free-free. Many things have an almost 0 cost, but even Craig Anderson's new book Free points out that SOMEONE pays SOMETHING eventually. It's just a matter of scale.. So you gotta ask, for concrete5 who is gonna be the guy to foot the bill.

In my mind - that should be the site owner. I don't want to be spatting ads over everything. I've worked in the industry and I don't have a lot of love of advertising. I would have a hard time going to sleep at night making money on something I didn't believe in, even if I believed it would make money.

I do think its very reasonable to ask some business or organization that has a real need for a website to pony up a couple hundred bucks for the software it takes to run the site. I think business owners find that reasonable too.

I do agree, it's not good to ask college kid developers to pony up cash to see how something works. If that's where we're heading, that's not what I want to be doing and its a momentary lining up of the planets that make it look that way. It is worth pointing out that slightly less than half the add-ons in our marketplace actually DO cost money. THE MAJORITY ARE FREE.

We need to redesign the interface there to make that obvious at a glance.. but it's true even today. When we can automate the submission process to make it easier for the community to post their own work, I imagine that will become more the case.

Just like Tony, I feel bad it takes a long time to approve stuff now. To be clear, the way that has worked so far is I pay a developer hourly to review code that someone has submitted. Emails go back and forth about what's broken/wrong. When/if it gets looking okay, we make pages in the marketplace using our awesome CMS and assign ownership to the author. Process can take anywhere from a couple hours to a day or more of back and forth. This means with the current process I am paying hundreds of dollars PER add-on to get them in the marketplace regardless of who wrote it or if it costs money. Obviously that's not sustainable. I'm not telling you all of this to complain, just pointing out for those who haven't done it
- Nothing Is Free To ME.

So any rate - not to beat a dead horse, but I think the question for the grownups here has to be "who is going to pay?" not "why isn't everything always free?"

To me the answer is "the person who wants a site." I think we're doing that as best as can be done with the resources we have and the energy were getting from the community. As always, I'm happy to hear how we can improve. Thanks again for the frank discussion, it's good to really talk about this in public.

My dad builds custom houses, and everything costs: plumbers, electricians, materials ... The idea of "doing it yourself" is costly and unreasonable. It costs money to build a house, so you pay money to build a house.

There's this counter-productive attitude that has developed in the digital world, because we can build and accomplish new things by only paying time and not money. In essence, our materials are free, and there are free workers (applications, frameworks) that are available to work for us.

However, when I bill my clients they are paying for my time. If I'm not billing per hour, I'm still giving them my time so that I can deliver their product.

I used to shy away from paid solutions, but honestly, if I can pay (in other words, MY CLIENT can pay) $55 for an add-on I couldn't hope to develop in a half-hour, who's winning? Everyone. My client is happy with a good product and a cheap price, and I can move on and focus on doing something cool rather than being steeped in reinventing the wheel and offering support.

Let's support the innovators. When you boil it down, Concrete5 makes me money. I think that paid add-ons can be a win-win for everyone, developers and site owners included.

Just some more input, My organization just spent over $30,000 dollars to have a custom website built by a third party. They are locked in to the tune of $250 a month in hosting fees and license fees, excluding anything but support for a site outage.

I came along about 3 months before it came online and when I said, "You spent what ?" then proceeded to show them concrete with a price of about 500$ without recurring fees for every conceivable feature, even some they don't currently have, the President, the CPA, and the CIO all but had a convulsive heart attack.

again Frz. I never once stated I think the Blog package is a joke. I don't. I think it's great. I also think it was released way to early and you are taking flack about all the issues, and you don't like that. sorry.

The random app? I respectfully disagree with how difficult that can be. sorry. That said, you are clearly a better, more accomplished developer than I. BUT, I just implemented a random image rotator on my site with no problems at all, and I just can't see how hard a random text mod can be. My ignorance I'm sure. (please don't explain it)

If you go back and read, I actually DID offer up suggestions to better your business model. for your convenience, I will state again:

1.) improve quality of released mods. regardless of weather YOU developed them or not, it reflects on your CMS.

2.) add a cost to the core and cap the cost of add ons.

perhaps even a limited functionality core for free, and a more robust app for $50/use. cap add-ons @ $15 or $20. DONE

you will have food on your table, and the people that would complain are people that can use something else for free, or be just as satisfied with a limited functionality free C5.

I am ok with you saying "I don't like your idea!". That's cool. But please don't suggest that no one is offering up ideas.

You just don't like them. lol

I'm on your team bro. And I VERY much want C5 to win. I just have very different ethos is all.

My point was never freebies. It was price point accountability and better quality.

I definitely want your kids to have food man. Don't hesitate to ask if things get tight.

Im not sure if I have enough experience to speak within this enviroment but none the less I think I see things differently here.

I am not sure if the developers have the right business model or not, but I can say I do like it.
I dont for one minute presume that I am in a position to suggest a better business model, nor would I approach any business and give suggestions on how to run one better, unless of course I had a similar business that was very successfull.
However, would I really approach Costco and tell them that Walmart have a better business model than them? Probably not! (Maybe thats a poor comparison) Its a bit pompous really. Sorry to come across a bit rude, its not my intention to offend anyone, but it just seems a bit bizarre, there are plenty of great suggestions but the tone of some of the posts just seems off.

I am sure some of the suggestions that have been put forward are excellent ones and if I am not mistaken the developers seem intelligent enough to incorporate some of those ideas if they seem viable to their own risk.But lets not forget it is just that, their risk, their investment.

I figure this much though, Concrete5 is still just a seedling really and given time more developers will release free packages and more developers will release paid packages. As the market place grows, more competitive pricing will come into place.

I look forward to being a part of this growing community, hopefully helping a few people along the way and having some interesting discussions.There are some colourfull characters here, but please can we discuss something else.

Much like Sean, I'm not sure if my opinion holds much weight here as I'm not a hard-core programmer who has released an add-on and had to support others with my code.

However, as a freelance web designer/developer who has enough experience maintaining and supporting clients with the various CMSs that I've built (from Joomla and Wordpress through to a couple of other CMSs that I've left alone since), I think it's PERFECTLY justified that a developer charges for an add-on they've created to cover the costs of developing and maintaining those add-ons.

In an ideal world yes, everything would be free and that's a big part of the Opensource philosophy. Kudos to those of you who have deep-pockets that can fund their own existence without a regular wage while creating and maintaining free add-ons. I rate you highly for your magnanimous attitude.

But, I totally respect that Franz is heading up a big and promising project here (that is primarily free I should add) with a lot of overheads. Those types of costs need to be considered in the grand scheme of things, not least, survival.

I make money from the websites I build and I consider myself to be a (semi)-professional. Not for one moment would I consider paying $15-100 for an add-on that will help me make my living a burden. Any client respects that there are costs in making these things, and if they don't, then there are free alternatives that I believe are of lesser quality or give more headaches in the long-run.

Of course, if you're learning as a student or need to create a website for your local community that has £0.01 budget, then it could seem rough to have to pay for those types of things. However, if you want something like a shop, then I'd argue you're looking to make some money from that site, and if you don't see yourself making more than $100 in the long-run with that site, then I suggest you sell a different product. If you make decent money from a product, then what's the issue with paying for an add-on on an already VERY flexible base CMS?

Seriously, Opensource is a great idea that I agree with in an ideal sense, but I don't think charging for more 'premium' stuff like add-ons is a bad thing.

[/end rant]

Another way to get more free addons is competition:

There's a paid addon in the marketplace to add an expandable/collapsable content:
http://www.concrete5.org/marketplace/addons/expandable_content/...

But now there's another addon which probably does pretty much the same:
http://www.codeblog.ch/2009/10/expandcollapse-block/...

And it's free..

As soon as someone creates a free blog package, a free eCommerce solution, things will probably change.

It might take a little bit longer, but I think it still works.

Fromhttp://37signals.com/svn/posts/1964-37signals-in-the-news-discussin...

"Entrepreneurs are getting the wrong message from the Klondike buyout of YouTube and the “ridiculous” valuation of Facebook, [the founders of 37signals] say, pointing out both companies are still hemorrhaging cash and haven’t figured out a way to make money. Free is a bubble that will burst when investors run out of patience."

This conversation was over. The arguing had stopped. Then I had to go an post that 37signals link, just because I thought it was interesting (I do admire their approach to business and all, since they were unfunded and yet profitable, a rarity in the world of IT). What was I thinking? I tried reading this latest slew of excessively heated responses, but gave up. I appreciate the different ideas expressed, but the point of these forums posts aren't about making everyone agree to your point of view. Seth, thank you for the input, really, but please respect that some of us hold a different point of view. I do agree with mario's point though, that the goal of concrete5 shouldn't just be to become the most popular CMS in the world. That would be great and all, but more importantly is to grow at a sustainable rate where the software doesn't become bloated, where we can hopefully someday pay our bills 100% from just supporting the project, where we still have the bandwidth to to help people out in the forums who are stuck, and in the end still have some free time to lead somewhat normal lives. time for a beer.

I was afraid this would happen, but I suppose I knew it would when I started it. This thread has totally gone in the wrong direction. If you read my first thread, I barely touch on the "free software paradigm" vs. the "paid software paradigm" argument. That's a worthy discussion, but it's for a different thread.

My whole point, stated at least 5 times in this thread, is not that the addons should be free. It's that if C5 wants to be a real competitor to Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc, they HAVE TO BE free. I agree, that we all need to make money, and we all should get compensated for the fine work we are doing. It just isn't what my argument was about.

But since you brought it up, I will say I think the software world was presented with a unique opportunity a couple decades ago that no other industry has really ever had the chance to explore. Because our material costs are so low (overhead for owning a computer and having an internet connection) our product can be created at essentially no out of pocket costs (and don't tell me time is money). I personally think in a capitalist economy, the fact that the free software paradigm has flourished is really amazing and great and I will do everything in my power to continue it. I use tons of free software and so do you. I don't have a problem giving back to the software community by making what I do available for free. I've only begun to pay back the community for all it's given me.

Ok, now that I think about it, I'm starting to see that a lot of the anti-"free software paradigm" agruments on this thread are pretty flimsy. We ALL use tons of free software without a single thought to the probably 100,000's of unpaid code hours that have gone into it. When's the last time you donated to the folks who built and maintain CentOS or Ubuntu or Apache or PHP or MySQL? Anyone out there using Eclipse or Aptana? How about Firefox or Thunderbird or Putty? I could go on with this arugment, but every web developer out there know their livelihood is largely based on someone else's free code. So next time you get your panties in a bunch about all the sweat and tears you put into the software you are now charging $55 a pop for, I'd like you to think about how much of what you used to actually create and run that code came to you free, no strings attached. If you write a mod for an existing free product and you spend 20 hours on it, consider it a miniscule payment back to the community that has been supporting you for years and will continue to. I think the software world has come as close as possible to a working share and share alike/socialist-ish/communist-ish whatever the hell you want to call it "we're all going to do our part" economy.

The point is someone is paying for it somewhere regardless of how free you think it might be, it has never been free. For the Record, I have worked across 20 different foss projects in the last 10 years, I know very well what goes into building free software and supporting it. In the last 10 years up until I began my master degree I have provided no less then 20 hours a week in free end user support across those platforms.

For the record projects like Ubuntu are not free, it never was free, it has billions of dollars invested in it by quite a number of large organizations. It might be free to you, but it was never free to them. Where do you think they get their money from ? That extends to every single project you have listed as "free." I know I am not alone in my experience on this forum. I do not believe making modules free will do anything to improve the visibility of this product since both free and paid modules are already available.

Having access to 6000 modules that all break each other is not my idea of a successful project. If moderation and cost ensure quality and performance then I have no problem with it. Just like I have no problem with free open software that provides usable replacements to commercial products.

Many of these project use support contracts to support development. I know I built out some of these contracts, with prices ranging from 100$ a call to $5,$8, $10,000 a year just in case you decide to call. We all know there isn't money to be found in the software we make under gpl, but "Free" doesn't make a product more appealing or more visible. What makes something appealing is performance and usability.

I applaud your energy, but I think you're not looking very deep. You have not sited a single example of software that is "free" as in /no-one/ paid for it. Everything in that list was paid for by someone, just not you. If you're argument is "go find a corporate sponsor," then you're making it very effectively.

Time is money.
I don't know how you eat, but to argue that computers are cheap so software development should be free is.. well I don't get it man... "flimsy" as you put it doesn't seem to even begin. There are 2000 man hours in the typical work year. Tens of thousands of hours have gone into the core of concrete5 alone. How should the people who did that, and continue to put in hundreds of hours a week supporting it, eat?

If the answer is "project work" then I'll see you again in 6 months. That's what we spent the first half of this year doing and the entire time the forum was filled with "when's ecommerce coming? when's this coming? when's that coming?" If the only benefit to the core team of an open source project is being the preferred contractors in using it, it's not hard to see that the project is going to go exactly where those guys want it to, at a slow speed, forever.

Moreover, none of what you listed was "free" in the sense you paint: 'costs so low no one has to pay for it.' Every example that I know anything about was paid for by someone else, just not YOU - the consumer.

Most of the unix flavors you mentioned make money through packages and support. So yes, YOU, oh college professor, can go get redhat for free from their site. If you're a business and you'd like a nice DVD with a build that has everything configured and a manual, you can pay them for that. You can also pay them to answer the phone. Not free. Just free to YOU.

PHP - the guy who wrote it has a job at Yahoo now. The core team is basically Zend. Zend doesn't do a lot of free stuff. PHP is their marketing engine. Same deal, build something important in PHP, great, you'll be talking to Zend about optimizing it eventually. Not really free, just free to YOU.

MySQL - that wasn't ever free. That was free to education but not to commercial. It was just bundled into the cost of your hosting platform. Now it's owned by Oracle. G'luck with that. Not free, not even to most consumers, just costs buried somewhere else.

Eclipse was financed by IBM and Rational to further their ends of getting everyone to write endless Use Cases and use Java. Not free (god the price we pay for THAT pain is endless), but "free" to YOU.

What else you got... oh Firefox? Mozilla Foundation, financed by Google to keep Microsoft from winning. Now that Chrome is out, firefox's days are numbered. Not free at all, financed by CPC ads and soon to be -gone-. but yeah.. free to YOU.

Wordpress? Two rounds of VC, second one $42m. Revenue? From ads on wordpress.com, & hosting for corporate clients. Free to YOU, but I promise you Phil Black doesn't share your feeling that wordpress is "Free"

So this can go on and on. But please don't sit there telling me we live in a socialist software world where everything is just peachy and free. It's just not that way. Everything costs money, even software.

Now can we find a way to make some big corporate partner pay for your use of concrete5? Well maybe. Frankly, that poker's still in the fire. Who knows? I can tell you one thing for sure though. If some deep pockets came along and financed the continued development of concrete5 and we turned around and said "from this day forth all add-ons are free and we've made that right with the 3rd party developers who wrote them in some fashion.", There'd be a whole new batch of things that you, or perhaps others, will find offensive about the strategy.

Oh, and both Joomla and dotNetNuke have paid add-ons - I hardly see how someone might argue we MUST be completely free to survive.. doesn't offering 3rd party developers a way to feel like they're investing in something beyond karma sound like a solid idea? I dunno.. Still does to me even after all these endless posts saying the same thing.

Don't take this post the wrong way. I welcome the debate, and clearly I share some of your dreams - but I have payroll, I have 20,000+ installs that demand bug fixes, I have reality to temper that dream.

Frankly I have no idea where we'll end up. I can tell you this however. Many of the add-ons that are available today would simply NOT be there if there wasn't at least the hope that the folks who have written them would get a payout (cash) eventually.

Still think my argument is flimsy even though I'm actually here footing the bills living this path? Here.. check out this thread from our closest competitor right now, modX:

http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,40774.0.html...

Seems like their fearless leader is listing just about every idea we've already started as a way they might try to make money. They've been doing this for 5 years, us for 1.

Drupal/Acquia already burned through $7 last year and raised another $8m this... What's left in your book that's "Free" - I'll go show you that its not. What you mean to say is "I, Seths, do not want to pay for it."

You are arguing about semantics here.

Let me ask you a question. When your friend says to you, "hey, I won a raffle and got a free lunch" do you jump on them and say "THAT LUNCH ISN'T FREE! SOMEONE SOMEWHERE IS PAYING FOR IT!"?

No, you don't. So why are you doing that to me? I know that software costs money somewhere. I'm not an idiot. It feels like you are purposely misinterpreting me to make your point. The word free clearly has many meanings and I think it's pretty clear I always was using the one that meant "without cost to the recipient". It's a pretty common usage and I think in the context of my posts it's pretty obvious that's what I was talking about. Now on to my response...

For every well funded project you or I has mentioned, there are 1000's of contributors who don't see a cent. Ever. Tons of the most popular addons and plugins for apps like Firefox and Thunderbird and Wordpress and tons of the best scripts and hacks and and packages for linux were developed without any funding, and no one "paid" for them in the sense you are talking about. Many of the libraries we use (e.g. PEAR, jQuery) weren't paid for.

And many projects start small, without funding, and as they grow they get funding. All your quotes about $7 million here and $8 million there don't really matter if we're talking about something that started as some guys web project that he did in his spare time. Someone who codes because they love to code. Someone who release something for free because they believe in it (see DAG).

And before anyone replies, please go back to my initial post, the first sentence of the third paragraph reads: "Now if your first, second, or third goals in creating Concrete5 was to make money, read no further." That's clearly been ignored in nearly every response to me. I'm making no judgements about whether or not C5 should be someone's bread and butter. That's never what I was arguing. I take back what I originally said about making all C5 addons free, I honestly have no problem with the C5 created contributions costing money, I'm not even necessarily against a "pro" or "commericial version" but I still don't think the user added contribs should even have the option to cost money. And maybe it's just those contributors who this is really aimed at. I just re-read my original posting, and I still stand by it.

I still have a lot to say, but this thread has strayed in too many directions for me to really focus and has very recently taken a turn for the mean and this will be my last post on the subject (we should also really get back to work). I'm really sorry if I made anyone feel bad here, that was not my intention. I still intend on contributing to this community because I still believe in it and hopefully if nothing else a few other folks who read this might feel the same.

"Let me ask you a question. When your friend says to you, "hey, I won a raffle and got a free lunch" do you jump on them and say "THAT LUNCH ISN'T FREE! SOMEONE SOMEWHERE IS PAYING FOR IT!"?

No, you don't. So why are you doing that to me?"


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actually, that example only works if my friend and I are both also chefs, and we happen to know the chef who is giving the free lunch out paid for the raw materials with a credit card.

In that case, I hope both my friend and I would say "Wow, it's pretty awesome that this chef is willing to go out on a limb like that."

I certainly wouldn't say "that was a good free lunch, really tasty, but it's an outrage the drinks cost money!"

That, my friend, is exactly what you're arguing, except to make it even more goofy - I, (the chef paying for free lunch in this case) has gone a step further and said, "ya know what, if you're a chef too and you make great drinks, feel free to make and sell them here, I'll just take 25%."

I really don't understand why you'd think it'd be okay to charge for a core but offer free add-ons... or the fact that it seems okay to you if /my/ crew has add-ons that cost money, but no one else should? If we did that, people would just sell them outside of this site, as they already are because our marketplace approval process is something out of the dark ages. At least if they sell them here I get 25% and we all have a hope of some type of continuity of support.

I mean, I strongly disagree with the argument that "open source means no money." I can recognize it as a philosophical position, however poorly informed and impractical.

I'm not sure I really understand where you're coming from at this point tho. It's been pointed out that there are both free and commercial add-ons in the marketplace. I wonder if what the real issue is here is we're a year old project with spotty documentation and there aren't thousands of how-to's spread across the web yet..

Are you just making a practical argument of "hey all the good stuff costs money, my students want to learn from it because your docs suck".. put it that way, and I'm likely to agree with you.

I quote seth:
"My whole point, stated at least 5 times in this thread, is not that the addons should be free. It's that if C5 wants to be a real competitor to Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc, they HAVE TO BE free."

English is not my native language, so can you explain the difference between "should be free" and "have to be free" in this context?
Your position is not very clear to me.

I have a few cents to add to this discussion. People who know me already know my point of view, but here we go:

I'm tired of people coming to this forum and complaining that c5 doesn't do this or that or they charge for this or that. If you like it, use it. If you don't, then use something else. If you have suggestions, you're welcome to do them. I know Franz and Andy are open to all constructive criticism. If you find bugs, fill a bug report. If you need something that's missing, write your own and if you're keen, release it for free for everyone to use it. And if other people (like myself) decide to sell their stuff, then let them be.
People know I was torn until the last moment between releasing my block for free or charging. In the end I'm happy I've charged for it. I've made enough money now to spend a whole day improving it and releasing a new version without it affecting my cashflow. And if someone else releases something similar for free, then it's a free world and market, they are welcome!

Maybe the premise that Concrete 5 needs to become the most popular CMS and beat Drupal, Joomla, etc. is flawed? Maybe being third (or other) place in adoption is best but first place in quality is fine?

Yes, Concrete 5 may explode if they choose a Drupalesque approach and it may not explode in a good way...as in a buggy mess.

However, I believe that the C5 team is maintaining a good balance between free and paid solutions. I've encouraged my company and many of my clients to purchase add-ons.

It's definitely cheaper in most cases than paying a developer to code a stable one from scratch and I like the fact that developers have an extra incentive to code well and maintain their work.

Nothing is stopping people from releasing free ones that are as good if not better. If the community as a whole decides that free is the way to go by pricing add-ons as that, then great!

My company recently bought the new ecommerce plug-in for one of our sites and they were just fine with paying the $95. We recognize that there may be some bugs but it actually helped that it wasn't free because we know that the team has at least some incentive to keep on updating it and this inspires confidence in adopting it as a potential solution.

well put in every way.
thanks.