SQLite provides community advice on their public forum for free but also offers Professional Support & Extension Products for private support. The SQLite Consortium members have the guaranteed, undivided attention of the SQLite developers for 23 staff-days per year.
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I do think this is indicative of a good way of thinking about the broader issues on BOTH money AND delivering solutions to end users.
“Qualified Skilled” would matter, so that the end employer knows they have kosher (see: 2) solutions.
I think i wrote too much in this thread already. 
TT
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I believe the donations should also come from the community. There are plugins that I use all the time and wouldn’t mind donating a little bit for those. A donation for something that effects me personally - would feel kinda guilty if didn’t give at least a token amount.
A donation is akin to a vote, products that are funded the most could help determine where resources should be concentrated. Although the funds would go to TiddlyWiki, would give exposure to the developers for possible paid private consultation from the talk.tiddlywiki marketplace.
The community marketplace should be built for us and make it fun. Come up with contests (like TiddlyWiki logo) or something where contestants donate a bit to enter - winner getting a TiddlyWiki T-shirt or something. (selling Merch? Hmmm…).
Idea is to establish contributing funds to become a natural part of the community ethic, much the same way submitting questions, ideas, solutions, and discussions already are.
Is basically a crowd funding model. Funding would increase as the community grows. Concentrate on growing the community with all the benefits it provides. One being to reach adequate funding to support TiddlyWiki’s future.
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Thinking further, I’d like to add a couple of points about why I think TW should have two versions, one which is a community version, with usual capabilities, and the other a Saas product:
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Donations- There definitely should be a donation button even if nobody donates. Having said that I feel donations would not bring in enough money month after month. Donations would be coming in here and there but they would not total up to anything one can pay bills with. But, even then, there should be a prominent donation button on the TW site.
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Small projects for individuals- While it might turn out to be a good way to make some income, it would not become a permanent solution. Projects come and go.
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Saas for students- I feel that $5 a month would be a reasonable charge for a second-tier offering of TW with higher features. And after, let’s say 2 years if the customer base grows to 5000 among the 100s of universities in the US, Canada and Europe, it could become a decent income. And let’s not forget that once TW has become a known name in the student community, there would be a spillover effect on college kids as well. The base would only grow over the coming years.
Keep in mind student community is a well-connected community. Things go viral in it. Really, I feel Saas for students should be the way to go.
To Jeremy, I would say I believe you have a right to earn money from what you have developed over decades. I agree with the philosophy of keeping the basic TW free, but there is nothing wrong with developing better features (group sharing, multi-user accounts, PDF import/exports?) and making money from them.
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Something I would definitely pay for is a whiteboard app/layout. I have found Cecily which is something similar but development seems to have been discontinue a long time ago.
I know of some new whiteboard apps such as Heptabase and Scrintal but these are proprietary. Another one is Kosmik which seems very promising and the developers are planning to open-source it.
However, I don’t know if any of these are going to achieve the level of ‘‘interconnectedness’’ and customisability TW is capable of. If there is interest in the community and an experienced developer would be willing to take this on, this could be another Opencollective project similar to the Fileuploads plugin.
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Very good “blast-from-the-past”! Likely on long-term hold because of lack of explicit take-up???
Therein is a clue, and relevant to the OP, maybe? Mr @jeremyruston has done a bunch of stuff in many directions very well with, unfortunately, low uptake? Not that I’m sure, but sure enoughish, I guess.
TT
I think it a good idea!
Not even sure you need a “developer” on that one
Maybe just a TW friend to hold you hand? Lol!
I’m being semi-serious.
Best, TT
No, thank you for pointing it out. It’s good to know that others have thought about this. It would be interesting to know if the people who have commented have made any advancements and perhaps if they would be willing to work on it given some financial incentive through Opencollective.
Just wondering, how would the SAAS part even work?
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I am not a developer so I do not know the technicality, but what I meant was that a site offering online accounts for TiddlyWiki, which will have some advanced features along with an offline component. The exact product and its offering would be something to be figured out by experts like Jeremy.
Advanced features might include multi-user accounts, collaborative work, advanced import, export, and image-to-text scanning of pages which students might photocopy from books etc, some advanced WYSIWYG editors, and an ability to publish research and papers onto a public-facing site. I think connected storage space for images and files will also be a good idea. There could be so many advanced features which will have to be researched, by the experts, by looking at what the target community is using right now and what are its pain points.
May features are already available in plugins which are laying around in the TW world. The point is to package everything into a marketable product and offer it as a subscription.
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Perhaps on the T-shirt
TiddlyWiki is not a game, but it is fun
TiddlyWiki Possibilities on the back of the T-Shirt
- Personal Productivity
- Your own Apps
- Software Democracy
- World/Game databases
- Website/Blog/Wiki
- Study & authorship tools
Just thinking
I want to come back to the OP.
I would like to see Mr @jeremyruston make a decent living from his creation of TW.
In a private conversation with a person (I won’t name) I thought about methods already used to get needed cash …
(1) The Plee Method
Q1: “It is still a mystery to me how any open source procects can earn money.”
A1: Right!
One solution is “fractional income” I think.
Meaning you get SMALL donations via links to PayPal etc.
Using a plee to the end users.
But, as far I can see that only works when you have 100’s of thousands of end users.
The active TW groups are too small scale for that approach to work??
It would be right not to prohibite community effort to offer the same kind of tools. Otherwise, it would not be as open as it used to be.
What you can monetize, finally, is ease of use. If the offer is not that expensive, most people will find it OK to use it. But if you want to have an opensource project built with/from tw, then you need to have all of your stack opensource. This is the community which will tell what is a common need and what is not. If someone has a very peculiar demand, it should develop its own solution or pay for it and this is a market place. He could pay an keep private or pay and release as open source (it could allow for cheaper maintenance).
Having said that, I agree that student are a key target for tw business.
(2) Open Source "Habits" Are An Issue?
This comment is not a solution. Rather about a common blockage to a solution.
Q2: “It is still a mystery to me how any open source projects can earn money.”
A2: One big issue with “open-source” is it is a “free-lunch”
The incentives to pay anything are near zero.
I kinda agree!
However, HOW would we make the hundreds-of-thousands of students aware of it and it’s relevance to them???
TT
(3) Subscriptions
Like it, or loathe it, the subscription thing is a thing of increasing scope.Might be worth a thought?
Q3: “It is still a mystery to me how any open source projects can earn money.”
A3: A serious model is “Subscription For Access” and, recently, the scale of subscription calls has increased generally on the net.
Might be worth a closer look?
(4) Consultancy
Q4: “It is still a mystery to me how any open source projects can earn money.”
A4: By being MORE than only “Open Source”; by offering bespoke consultancy.
This side of TW Services is seriously (publicly) under-developed?
Just prove that it is relevant by publishing examples of student generated works. only original works, published in some form of zero copyright by themselves.
problems : these kind of notes are not easily set to free licenses as most often derivatives of course by teachers which are not freely available.
But it is the kind of actions that would illustrate most what TW can achieve. We can hope to get in contact with some teachers sufficiently interested in the process it can lead and willing to find a solution.
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I strongly reject any subscription based services. not ethical. incite to monthly donation if you will, don’t request it, don’t mess with that kind of things. The net is great. Really free software will take the place of greedy software.
You can setup a roadmap and condition working on agreed target only if a sufficient funding has been attained. The money would go where the need is and such a mechanism could make for a lot of improvements. I already encontered such a scheme in free projects. It is also not unlike pledges on kickstarter.
Maybe also launch a kickstarter campaign. It could give visibility and mean money for Mr Ruston!
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