Whether Vanilla should come prepackaged with certain plugins for a price.

Raize

I believe that a version of Vanilla with certain essential plugins included, maintained, and developed by the Vanilla team would be worth money. It's better than a donate button, and real professionals are willing to pay for a good "turn key" forum. What do you guys think?

yes/no/maybe?

Linc

http://vanillaforums.org/page/ProductRoadMap

They plan to release "1 New plugin, feature, or upgrade every week" once Vanilla 2 is released. The point of Vanilla is that you get to decide which plugins are essential

Mark

It's not a bad idea at all. Something we will definitely consider.

Raize

Thanks Mark... any other opinions?

fredwu

@Mark How about a revenue share model, if a certain 3rd party plugin is selected to be included in the package?

fmimoso

Yes, as long as those plugins are reliable and supported.
The actual problem with Vanilla 1 is the stalling of plugins... once they die, almost no one will resuscitate them (except SubJunk - kudos to him).

Mark

@fmimoso is absolutely right. We plan on working hard to make sure that Vanilla 2 addons get the support they need.

As far as rev share goes, it's an interesting question. I spoke with Matt Mullenweg a few months ago about that type of thing, and he said that he felt bringing revenue into an open source community can kill it. He said that when you are making money from an addon (theme, plugin, whatever), and someone else comes along and wants to branch your code, you suddenly become very upset, and you want to change the license to something non-open source. I don't know about that. I think it would just make you want to keep working on your addon (or start work on other/better ones, too).

We've said all along that we want to do everything we can to help the community, so we're definitely interested in exploring things like revenue sharing. Beyond that, we absolutely encourage everyone in the community to try to make money any way they can with Vanilla. There are many, many companies that develop plugins and themes for other open-source projects and have made fortunes doing it. We hope that is possible for you guys with Vanilla, too. Our goal is to get as many people using it as possible, so it opens up a world of opportunities for you guys.