Money -- Open Source & TW

#12

concept

  • This can define the scope of tiddlywiki as a product/service or even project.

notes

  1. “acquitting everything is not always feasible.”
  2. Linux is used today for many things, but what makes linux free is the variety of companies that use linux.
  3. Part of the money that comes to linux is made by donations from companies or individuals.
  4. Also, there are linux certifications to make people more qualified to teach or install linux correctly.
  5. This is what gives linux its value, in addition to the dozens of articles telling the ins and outs of linux.
  6. In this sense, if there are donations from people and companies and also certifications for specialized people, it could make tiddlywiki more usable given the example I mentioned about Linux.
  7. I’m not criticizing Linux or tiddlywiki, just seeing what they both have in terms of the market.
  8. When I say “acquitting everything is not always feasible.” - there was a discussion about the characteristics of tiddlywiki if it would be a marketplace/framework or even a product/service.
  9. When I say “absolving everything is not always feasible”. - sometimes the product/service is defined by the market, developers or technology.
#13

We are all volunteers here. Which is why I am pushing back on things that people are asking for asking them to commit to volunteering and organizing. There are many non programmer tasks.

Absolutely not a problem if you (or anyone else!) doesn’t have time to volunteer, but the reality is that then things will not get done otherwise. This is the classic case of some need for self organizing and group collaboration.

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#14

Github has a sponsorship technology (GitHub Sponsors · GitHub) . But the developer has to sign up, of course. Don’t know if GH takes a cut or invades privacy like PP does. But considering that almost all developers have a presence on GH, it might be worth investigating.

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#15

@Mark_S @boris @TiddlyTweeter Hi! This idea is great, it would be interesting to have a tiddlywiki sponsorship program. Volunteers could be paid by people that donating for tiddlywiki, or volunteers could be paid by companies that believe in tiddlywiki potential. This idea is similar to the aforementioned consulting program.

#16

Mozilla has a volunteer program for people who write content about Firefox, it’s a way for you to get people to commit.

#17

Yes, and that’s why I set up #projects:opencollective – which isn’t restricted to developers and Github but can work anywhere.

We have active donations through TW’s Open Collective. If other people want to volunteer to do more with it – we could.

Here’s what I wrote in the intro:

Unfortunately, I ran short on volunteering time and no one else had interest or time to do more.

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#18

This involves this topic:UX/Product questions

#19

Joplin(Joplin Cloud), Bitwarden has a subscription program

#20

I don’t know the answer to this question, but I can give you my thought process and experience as a user.

A few months ago I decided to try out LogSeq and ended up liking it a lot. I continued using it for a while, but I had an uneasy feeling about the business model. I knew that the devs wanted to monetize it, but I couldn’t find any clarification on how they would do that. I just wasn’t sure if certain features would be paywalled in the future, and I didn’t feel comfortable investing a lot of my time into it.

One of the main things that drew me back to TiddlyWiki was knowing that the sky is the limit with the software, and nothing will ever be locked behind a paywall.

While I think that it is important for the core product to remain free and open source, I think that there are some good ways to monetize it:

  • paid synchronization service
  • paid mobile apps
  • GitHub sponsorship
  • plugin/theme competitions with prize money (from donations)
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#21

Right. Wonderful people. Who never get paid anything.

That is what my OP is about! It seems people who do so much work just get no money back?

To try get the issue on “TW Open Source” in focus … WHY aren’t we at least Moderately Commercial?

TT

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#22

Joplin(Joplin Cloud), Bitwarden, Evernote… great apps like these, have a cloud - here we would have tiddlyhosts - but I don’t know if it’s applicable here.

#23

Ways to make money as an external developer not in the community

So… ways to make money as an external developer not in the community

  • Monthly/annual donation for plugins it you create, develop and/or keep
  • Monthly/annual donation for themes you create, develop and/or keep
  • Another way would be a commercial partnership with a company to develop exclusive themes or plugins and earn some money from it.
  • Another way would be if tiddlwiki adopted a business model like open-core, part of the code was community and part of the code was closed. Closing here would just be themes, customizations, plugins and specialized technical support like GitHub, Bitwarden etc.
  • Offer courses on how to use tiddlywiki, these courses you can create on Youtube or any social network in order to earn money with a tool as tiddlywiki.
  • Another way is to be a tiddlywiki consultant and earn money teaching how to use tiddlywiki - unlike the video courses I mentioned. Tiddlywiki consultant would be someone on the technical team registered to perform this role/position. “Bitwarden has several roles so that Bitwarden is something community and at the same time paid for companies as frontend, backend, designers, engineers etc.”

So…

1. community money (members)

  • paid synchronization service
  • paid mobile apps
  • GitHub sponsorship
  • plugin/theme competitions with prize money (from donations)
  • Another way is to be a tiddlywiki consultant and earn money teaching how to use tiddlywiki - unlike the video courses I mentioned. Tiddlywiki consultant would be someone on the technical team registered to perform this role/position. “Bitwarden has several roles so that Bitwarden is something community and at the same time paid for companies as frontend, backend, designers, engineers etc.”

2. money outside the community (stackholders)

  • Monthly/annual donation for plugins it you create, develop and/or keep
  • Monthly/annual donation for themes you create, develop and/or keep
  • Another way would be a commercial partnership with a company to develop exclusive themes or plugins and earn some money from it.
  • Another way would be if tiddlwiki adopted a business model like open-core, part of the code was community and part of the code was closed. Closing here would just be themes, customizations, plugins and specialized technical support like GitHub, Bitwarden etc.
  • Offer courses on how to use tiddlywiki, these courses you can create on Youtube or any social network in order to earn money with a tool as tiddlywiki.

3. money invested in the community (investors, companies)

  • Integration with plugins, themes for companies
  • crowdfunding: you get profits if the community grows and hires more people, developers, volunteers
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#24

I think you make good considered points.

Like that one: TW is never restrictive

TT

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#25

@TiddlyTweeter @boris @Tiddlybob @Mark_S Does this idea make sense?

#26

Right. Not so difficult.

My OP was really about seeing folk like @pmario and @Mark_S and others putting in hours a day for zilch. There is something wrong if we can’t fully acknowledge them. In modern culture that includes money — well money more than anything else.

TT

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#27
  • There is a difference between money and value.
  • Price is the amount of money a consumer has to pay to purchase a product or service. The concept of value, on the other hand, is related to going beyond customer expectations.
  • “You can be a great programmer and have no money. that doesn’t make you a bad programmer, it just makes no one realize that you’re a great programmer.” - In my case, for people to see that I am a programmer, I have taken courses and participate in open source communities as tiddlywiki.
#28

Hey you got the wrong guy on this :slight_smile:

Do you want the long version of Marx or the short?

Happy, TT

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#29

I agree. I know there’s a ton of work that goes into TW development and they deserve to be compensated for that. I’m not sure what the best solution is to maintain TiddlyWiki’s “magic” of being unrestrictive, while also compensating the developers for their hard work.

Maybe we could make donation goals and improve the visibility of the initiative? Kind of like what Wikipedia does, but maybe not as intrusive.

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#30

I think that’s a good summary. And the “extra” services could subsidize core development, to maintain TW’s free nature.

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#31
  1. There are several worldviews: capitalism, anarchism, socialism - you can choose any one.I’m talking about freedom of choice here. Some visions are social(marx), others social-economic(liberal, libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism, social-capitalism), economic(capitalism), philosophy(Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Epicurus, etc).
  2. In my case, I like the liberal, non-libertarian and non-anarchist or anarcho-capitalist view.
  3. In my case, I agree to disagree with your opinion.
  4. Even within Marxism, there are various worldviews. For example… what I mean is that there is a difference between representation and form. This concept can be linked to the idea of representational capitalism: price and value. So… value is how much that product represents to the customer. It is a more subjective concept as it can change from person to person. He is happy to purchase the product or service. - For example, tiddlywiki is a great product/service - but that doesn’t mean I’ll donate if I want to. Talk about it, in the sense of the spectacle society * The Society of the Spectacle (French: La société du spectacle ) is a 1967 work of philosophy and Marxist critical theory by Guy Debord*
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