[TYPO3-dev] TYPO3 heresy: what about "selling" pro extensions?

[Ulrich Lorenz PHZ Luzern]

Hi everyone

Writing this post was motivated by reading this list for quite some time now and especially this particular post and the discussion following "blog_example gives error "A cache with identifier "cache_extbase_reflection" does not exist".

I'm not a (good) developer but an integrator and project manager for a small company and a University of teacher education in Switzerland, using TYPO3 on a near daily basis for about 2 years now.

Let me say I'm a bit concerned about the tensions that light up regularly between the lines in the dev list. To me the Berlin manifesto shows a very promising way to go on:

* TYPO3 v4 continues to be actively developed
* v4 development will continue after the the release of v5
* Future releases of v4 will see its features converge with those in TYPO3 v5
* TYPO3 v5 will be the successor to TYPO3 v4
* Migration of content from TYPO3 v4 to TYPO3 v5 will be easily possible
* TYPO3 v5 will introduce many new concepts and ideas. Learning never stops and we'll help with adequate resources to ensure a smooth transition

As always the problem is to keep everyone up on a common goal. If the active devs draw back instead of going along with the new stuff there will be a gap in the community that could seriously throw back the TYPO3 community. I never participated on real life events so far but reading the lists here I get the impression that some people are not really happy with the way TYPO3 is moving on. In example I have great respect of Dmitry Dulepov as many others in these lists do and so it is really disturbing to see that he has no plans to use the new technology. After reading his comments attentively it is clear that sometimes he has not the most progressive points of view on such things but the fact that he repeats his opinion over and over shows me that something is wrong with communications. 

I like people fouling their own nest because lively debates about what to do and how to do it are much better than people that accept everything to prevent an open conflict. But in my opinion in a development that takes several years you cannot only argue with the expected results. It's nice to know that everything will be fine in the end and personally I'm sure that FLOW3/Phoenix will be successful in the end. But always stating that "it's an Alpha", "it's still under construction" and so on is no answer to people calling the whole strategy and it's execution into question. Are there - besides talented devs and designers - no people to communicate, mediate and moderate these valuable discussions? To convince other people of using and contributing to TYPO3, you need to convince them that TYPO3 has a future.

Let's take a person that's new to TYPO3. He oder she subscribes to the list and asks for the best way to develop an extension. Someone will answer "invest to the future, take ExtBase and Fluid", another one will answer that he _must_ recommend ExtBase and Fluid and would better not express his personal opinion while person c points to a report that compares a FLOW3 alpha to stable frameworks. That is no problem as long as it's Mr. Anonymous and Ms. Anonyma are discussing like this but if talented devs are talking like this without coming a step closer to a suitable solution after quite some time then TYPO3 has a problem.

Let us take me, an integrator using some of the "most famous" extensions regularly and planning to use TYPO3 for another decade and more: I know that TYPO3 has reached a level that it can be used for 80% of the websites out there even if tomorrow everyone stops developing on it. Even though I have the feeling that the May of v4 will not last forever: Look i.e. at tt_address, rank 12 in TER. It has some annoying bugs but the bugtracker wasn't touched by the author (who has - as far as I know - a lot of other T3 stuff to do) for years. Is anyone expecting that there will be an all new version of tt_address using the v4-only way? In think that once ExtBase and FLOW3 are stable the focus - especially of 'newer' users - will switch to the new technologies. So IMO there is a great interest in a collaborative effort for moving on.


About pro extensions:

I think it must be found out what can be sold: Extensions like RealURL or Static info tables are hard to sale as they offer a functionality I would associate them to Core features. We have indexed search and felogin as part of the package, but we have no modern functionality for rewriting URLs? In my eyes it would be better to have such essential features as part of the distribution and maybe financed in a way by the association.

For specialized features I think it is already usual that a customer pays an agency to develop an extension. The problem is that they are often too specific to have an advantage by having them in the TER. Apart from that publishing an extension without a documentation is at least questionable so a company needs more time. Nevertheless there are some good examples that there are still some companies out there publishing their great work, thinking i.e. of the TemplaVoila Framework or the (not perfect, but nice and usable) T3BLOG.

If I should pay for an extension in advance I needed to have a great confidence in the dev team of the extension. An example for selling extensions is tt_products and there I've lost completely track about version numbers and features, why categorizing products should be bought as an extra extension and besides from that the shop selling the extension is not the best demonstration of how to do it. But I understand that if the extension was free less people would be willing to pay for it.

Maybe it would be a solution to establish a "TYPO3 fair use" label. Looking at a quote from a Swiss TYPO3 agency I see that the integration of direct_mail and a user registration costs 2200 CHF (~1500 €). Would it hurt to give, let's say 20 € of that to the devs of the extension? If 5% of the people that downloaded direct_mail had donated 20 € for using it they would have gotten 50'000 € over the years. I know, not enough for retiring or feeding a family for years, but more than nothing. If TYPO3 agencies could get a "TYPO3 fair use" label if they pay a small amount for each extension they're using for a customer (and there was a platform to provide easy handling without high administration fees), maybe more people would be willing to contribute and people who still contribute would get something more back than just a "thank you". Being nice is a good selling argument, so it could be a win-win situation. The agency is nice because it helps TYPO3 to exist as it is nice to power its server by green electricity and using FSC certified paper...


So far. These are just ideas and thoughts but maybe they lead to a little discussion about these topics.


Lorenz