Hi,

I'm a bit confused with your announcement.

You posted that you were willing to share your experience with the core module team and you announce a day later that you are actually selling your fixes and improvements. How will you now be able to conciliate both?

I can see that you did not do that with a bad intention in the first place. And I can understand you think you will be able to go your way a little ahead without harming the core developement and even contributing to some extent to it.

I just don't think it's possible in the current situation.

Let me tell you about a similar story I had with Vincenç. I guess it's a good thread to start discussing similar issues with the community.

2 years ago, before he got into the core team, Vincenç was releasing his infomap module for free with the source code included on his website.

At that time, the module was meant for publishing a map of contacts. It displayed incons on top of an image, and dealt with clicks and positioning through an linkimage.

I thought it was a nice module technically speaking, but I did not have much use of it. What I needed was something to draw html maps. The basis was there though, so I started over some of his code and implemented the desired functionality.

I discarded much of the business model and dropped the dataprovider, I developped a html map renderer, and I concentrated on the interface to draw shapes such as polygons on top of an image to get associated with a link through a url control.

The result was pretty nice and I was quite enthusiastic. I thought "this is a module that people are gonna need, I should sell it". So I wrote a long email to Vinç to tell him a big thanks for the code base, with my source code attached to it.

How naive I was... You can imagine he was not so happy.

For my discharge, I'd say that it was quite an exciting time for the DNN community. DNN 3 was just getting released with the long awaited multi language support. Loads of nice modules were being invented every week. Peter was starting best selling DMX, Active Forum was on top too, and Snowcovered was in everyone's sight. My reasoning was then: "Vinç is releasing a simple module for free, contact map management. I can sell an advanced module for spatial navigation. DNN carries an ecosystem that grows fast. There are many examples of commercial modules built as advanced extension of core ones. There must be enough place for everyone as long was we keep producing our own added value"

Vinç did not think like that of course, when he announced me quite embarassed that he was just on the way to release a commercial version too, with pretty much the same features. I insisted that our modules could coexist, that I wouldn't chase on his content management capabilities as long as he kept me some space with html based navigation. 

Of course that was pretty much irrealistic. Although the code base probably does not share much in the last version, there wasn't much to prevent the competition, which I don't think paid much for any of us. I tried to introduce some fancy features, such as online maps sniffing, rollover effects... I even made some use of the "Four-colour theorem" to efficiently slice the rollover images to get rendered, and ironically I was an early adopter of the custom permission feature, which Vinç lastly blogged about.

I knew I was singularizing my module that way, and I thought it would end up paying back.

The reality was completely different and I can tell you I hardly sold more than 50 modules since the very beginning, which is just pure loss (without mentioning snowcovered's 20%). I guess Vinç did not get a great result either, since he has not published a release for long.

Now this is also because commercial APIs such as google maps fit most of people's need, and there's no real place for two competing modules displaying custom maps.

But I also think that we produced interesting and quite complementary pieces of code, and I'm sure the story would have been very different and probably more successful if we had team up to builld that mapping module together.

So you can argue that the e-commerce market is just about the opposite and it's got a huge potential, which catalook has monopolized for long. But then is there that much place for differenciation? And are you willing to take such a painful path?

So here are some thoughts inspired from my story: you should not expect to sell that many modules as long as the core moves on from the current beta stage, and you should not think that coexistence is going to be easy. At best, there will be competition issues: you'll have to keep justifying the price as the core module grows up. At worst, there will be ethical issues if you don't manage to get away with some clearly justified own added value (and I'm afraid time spent fixing bugs does not count much).

So it's up to you: if you want to make money out of your current dev, then go for differenciation and more advanced specific features and keep making sure by direct agreement with the project and core team that you can sell what you code. I think this is going to be much more time before it pays, because I also think they won't be happy having you keep selling what you have now.

If you can't afford it, share your improvements and get the place you deserve in the team. Then sell your reputation with custom devs (which can be store add-ons), and/or services (conceive and host your customer stores)

Of course I think the wise solution is the second one because that's the one that would best benefit the community.