Hello MC-Market community!
Concept
Following Mick's announcement to start enforcing GPL licensing on proprietary spigot forks on this platform, I was inclined to propose a way these authors could comply without sacrificing profits.
You could offer your resource for the same price, but instead of paying for the actual code, they are paying for what's listed in the next category.
What People Are Paying For:
Information Wants to be Free
The truth is, 90% of customers are not developers and are willing to pay $20 just to receive the compiled plugin, plus they get all the additional services above.
If we can make this the norm in plugin/server jar development instead of extremely heavy DRM & obfuscation, it will be a step in the right direction.
At its core, you are now selling a service, not intellectual property. By removing the paywall from your intellectual property and freeing your code to be viewed by anyone, you're contributing to a global movement of freeing information. If you want to read more about the ideology that all intellectual property should be free, please read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free
Pirating
If there are bad actors that choose to distribute a compiled version of your free source code, its not a big problem because:
In Practice
AsyncWorldEdit puts this into practice and has over 3500 purchases at $7. Your target demographic is willing to pay.
This concept is proven to work and make money, and even in the case that you aren't legally forced to do this (in the case of server jars), it is a step towards bettering the minecraft community.
Thank you for considering, this is just an idea and very much open to discussion.
Concept
Following Mick's announcement to start enforcing GPL licensing on proprietary spigot forks on this platform, I was inclined to propose a way these authors could comply without sacrificing profits.
You could offer your resource for the same price, but instead of paying for the actual code, they are paying for what's listed in the next category.
What People Are Paying For:
- Compiled plugin/server jar
- Feeling good that they donated to an open-sourced developer
- Plugin Support
- Feature Requests
- Launcher - Auto-updates/CLI (if applicable)
- This would still require obfuscation/DRM licensing so it can't be leaked
- Launcher is considered a service since it has to connect to server hosted by you
- Source code
- Provided "as-is" with no support
- No compilation/installation instructions
- No launcher (for auto-updates/CLI) - if applicable
- Licensing requirements
- All code under a 'same license' license will be licensed under that license (Example: all code written by bukkit will be licensed under GPL).
- All code that is either your own or under a more permissive license will be licensed under the attached license (bottom of post).
- This license restricts redistribution in compiled/binary form
- This license restricts build-tools/compilation instructions
- Redistributions of source code must have same license and they must be free of charge
- Credit to SBPrime for providing this license
Information Wants to be Free
The truth is, 90% of customers are not developers and are willing to pay $20 just to receive the compiled plugin, plus they get all the additional services above.
If we can make this the norm in plugin/server jar development instead of extremely heavy DRM & obfuscation, it will be a step in the right direction.
At its core, you are now selling a service, not intellectual property. By removing the paywall from your intellectual property and freeing your code to be viewed by anyone, you're contributing to a global movement of freeing information. If you want to read more about the ideology that all intellectual property should be free, please read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free
Pirating
If there are bad actors that choose to distribute a compiled version of your free source code, its not a big problem because:
- Its very unlikely that they will keep up with updates
- You still offer a bunch of other services like launcher, support, and feature request
- There is a growing stigma around using leaked things & not supporting developers.
In Practice
AsyncWorldEdit puts this into practice and has over 3500 purchases at $7. Your target demographic is willing to pay.
This concept is proven to work and make money, and even in the case that you aren't legally forced to do this (in the case of server jars), it is a step towards bettering the minecraft community.
Thank you for considering, this is just an idea and very much open to discussion.
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