It’s been over 2 years since I released YAK for WordPress (6th of March, 2006 according to Sourceforge), and the forthcoming release finally starts to tidy up a few loose ends. It was always a bit hacky — from a user interface perspective, that is — and 1.0.3 sorts out a few of the most obvious problems (this is not to say it’ll be perfect, of course).
YAK has always represented a reasonably significant investment in time. I don’t put a huge amount of effort into development now that it’s hit the 1.0 release, but popularity brings an inevitable increase in the number of calls for support.
Family commitments mean that I have less time available — or at the very least, it’s harder to justify spending the time. The obvious answer, suggested by a couple of people, is to commercialise (at least in part) the plugin.
There are plenty of open source projects which have at least a small commercial component. And plenty more which are mainly commercial, but release unsupported open source versions. An example of the former are projects which have paid-for documentation. An example of the latter would be something like JBoss or MySQL, which release community and enterprise versions of their apps — the enterprise version, rather obviously, providing commercial support.
So this brings me to a question: where to, with a semi-commercial version of YAK?
There are a few options on the table:
- Reduce the detail of the online documentation and release a paid-for installation manual.
- Release a supported, commercial version of the plugin with the latest features, and the open source version (with those features) would follow a few months later (only the commercial version would be supported).
- Per-request charge for support, perhaps based upon the time taken.
What do you think? Any better ideas?
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