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.
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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I think you make good considered points.
Like that one: TW is never restrictive
TT
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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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- 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.
Hey you got the wrong guy on this 
Do you want the long version of Marx or the short?
Happy, TT
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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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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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- 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).
- In my case, I like the liberal, non-libertarian and non-anarchist or anarcho-capitalist view.
- In my case, I agree to disagree with your opinion.
- 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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Exactly that. ACKNOWLEDGE somehow.
Right. RECOMPENSE somehow.
How, practically, I dunno. But at least get an agenda for it …?
Best TT
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What is my opinion you disagree with?
TT
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Right. The TW is a good yet donation is elusive.
Why is that?
TT
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Right. As Marx wrote: "It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.”
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Roughly, this is how open source communities work. There is no cost for sharing the bits of code with open licenses. The cost is people’s time for development, documentation, maintenance, and community.
There are many people here contributing unheard of amounts of time troubleshooting and feature scripts and the many other tweaks and optimizations. Most open source communities I have seen don’t have this volume of output of solutions – this speaks to the “end user programmability” of TW.
A much smaller group of people are spending time running the community / sorting the Github issues / writing code.
The talking we had done earlier around open collective, and my sort of thought process, was “what if a set of community contributions equalled one more half-time developer”, as an example goal, who could work with Jeremy on code centric issues.
The current “bank account” for TiddlyWiki in Open Collective is currently just over $1000USD → TiddlyWikiDotOrg - Open Collective
The cost of running Talk TW is about $60 / month, or $1200 annually – so we aren’t even covering costs yet. I’ve been paying this and haven’t expensed it yet, and probably what I’ll do is make a donation for the past year. Jeremy has also offered to pay the cost for this directly.
This is all a very complicated discussion, but mostly it means volunteering and taking responsibility for things and driving them forward, beyond just discussion.
My hypothesis would be, is that if a group of people took responsibility for promoting, marketing, and supporting TW donations, that we could get to break even for the infrastructure … and then work on other goals.
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Let’s go some reasons
- I don’t want
- I don’t need to - there’s nothing in the mit, gpl etc licenses that forces someone to pay something
- I only pay if I want to
- there are no laws in any country that control my individual decision to donate money to some software, software is work tools that’s all
- ‘I can be making money from tiddlywiki courses’, this does not force me to donate something to tiddlywiki
- I can be an end user and not a developer, so I don’t need to pay a donation to the project
So…
- I can have several reasons - all these reasons don’t affect the value of tiddlywiki, value is one thing, price is another.
- Just because something is open doesn’t mean it won’t be paid for, but it also doesn’t mean it should be paid for.
- Do you want to force someone to pay something?
- make a closed source project. but know that money not something fixed and unchanging
- open source with restrictions like open core, technical training program, etc. but know that donations are not something fixed and unchanging
- foss code. but know that donations are not something fixed and unchanging
- In all these cases, it must have value and not just a price
- See? the representation, the value? value is something of representation. It has nothing to do with knowledge directly, not even the amount of work you do. It’s a perception of reality that people have of you.
- So… In my case, although this perception has several criteria… there are several social, philosophical, cultural criteria, etc. In my case… to be a programmer I did: ‘courses’, ‘I participate in projects of various types’, ‘I created my software’, ‘I work as a freelancer’ etc. - that doesn’t make me better or worse than anyone else, only I have the perception of being a programmer.
- You can use this same definition/concept for paid, foss, open source software. So… Why do people use tiddlywiki? - This type of question gives some insights into how to provide money to tiddlywiki as I mentioned here: UX/Product questions
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LogSeq is open source. They have received investment funding. They have an OpenCollective where you can donate $15 / month.
I don’t know their exact plans, but yes, I expect them to likely have some mobile synching as a commercial offering.
And: absolutely things could be locked behind a paywall with TW, if someone decides to make a commercial offering around it. In fact, the Quine app for Apple devices is $5 one time fee Quine on the App Store – I’m a very happy paid user of this. I’d happily pay a subscription to the dev if it included some different sync options.
LogSeq and TW both share that the core product has an open source license that anyone can use and re-use as needed. So whether TW or LogSeq, other developers, commercial users, or end users can continue to use it in different ways.
(TiddlyBob – this was a super useful tidbit to share – thank you!)
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Right. I do see what YOU contributed. My OP was not so much about helping open source work better, rather about giving back to the folk who sweat for us everyday already.
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Hey, do your thought experiments but not on my time.
WHAT is your outcome?
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my contribution is here:
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