Thanks @JonL for starting this actionable call. Hopefully this doesn’t turn into one of those long plugin threads again.
a) Do you like the idea?
Yes
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Like this post
Done. (that was easy) -
Comment why you like it
Because we’ve had enough discussion and we all know what we want so it’s time to take action.
There are many times I wish i could just get a pull request to a fix for a bug in one of my plugins. -
Send me your Github email through PM so I can add you to the Github organisation.
I can do that but before that there are two issues that needs to be addressed. See below.
What is Bubble stance on this?
I know @Bubble has intentionally not interfered in most of this plugin discussion which i personally think is a good decision.
But now that we wan’t to move from discussion to action we need to know where they stand.
This is important because we’re going to need bubble to be on board for this to work.
For all we know, Bubble see the Plugin and Template market as one of their main revenue streams.
If this data in this post is true then out of the $2M revenue bubble generated in the past year about $350k was from plugin/templates (for those that are not aware bubble takes a percentage of plugin/template sales).
So the big question is, does Bubble want to have an Open Source community for plugin and templates which will potentially cut one of their revenue source?
Licencing
Lets face it, a lot of people on bubble are entrepreneurs who wants to make things and probably create the next Uber or AirBnB.
So what will be the licencing agreement for community created plugins that are going to be used in commercial products. Whats in it for plugin developers?
While i’m happy to join any community effort to create free plugins, i don’t think it is fair to developers to spend their time to create free plugins and provide support when others are just using it in their commercial products and probably making money off it.
So there might have to be some licencing agreement about such community created plugins used in commercial products.
Let me give you a real example that happened right here on this forum (I hope the individual involved doesn’t get offended by this).
Someone asked for help on this forum about a plugin he was creating. I provided some guidance but he kept coming back with more questions. Eventually he sent me a PM admitting that he’s not a programmer and this is his first time writing a plugin. After several back and forth i decided its better to write the code for him than trying to explain to him what he should do.
So I just sent him some code to just copy and paste.
It worked and he thanked me.
Following day I see a post about he publishing the plugin to the store and even thanked me in the post for helping him create his first plugin.
Fast forward few days after and i’m working on this project and I realized i actually need that plugin i helped this guy create so decided to go and use it.
To my surprised the guy was actually selling the plugin (its actually still being sold). I was like WTF.
I virtually wrote the plugin for you (about 90% of the code) and you decided to sell it and I have to pay to use it myself. So i ended up creating my own private one to use.
So yes we need Bubble to be on board, help us sync the code from github to the bubble editor (never got this to work, works the other way though) and come up with a fair licencing agreement.