Theme inspired by nostrich.

4th May 2011

Text

Introducing our modules platform

LocomotiveCMS is a very young open source project but it gets more and more users each week. More users also means that we have to deal with more work like answering questions, look into feature requests, fixing bugs of course, …etc. That’s the price of fame ! 

Unfortunately, all of these tasks take a lot of time. At the end, we spend more time on LocomotiveCMS than on our other (paid) projects which can compromise the future of our CMS.

That being said, the situation also made us think about how we were going to monetize LocomotiveCMS. We had in mind a couple of obvious ideas like providing a hosting platform for example.
In fact, we are already collaborating with a startup (bushi.do) which its activity is to who offers hosting solutions for any open source project. We’ll talk about it very soon. Believe us, it i’s going to be huge !

Since we already developed a command line tool to quickly build Locomotive websites, we came to the conclusion that it would be simpler for us, in terms of development, to sell it.
Moreover, our tool was used successfully by a couple of early adopters. Besides, it became obvious we were going to sell other tools or modules, for the reason that our philosophy on this project is to keep the core engine as simple as possible. One thing leading to another, we ended up with the modules marketplace solution.

The concept behind is quite simple. Let’s say, as a developer and LocomotiveCMS user, you miss a functionality which has a business value for you and certainly for other people / companies. No problem ! You develop it with our help (that way we validate your idea), we sell it directly from the LocomotiveCMS official website and we share the revenues. The percentage will depend on our contribution to each module’s development.

Does our modules marketplace break the spirit of the open source ? We don’t think so.
First, there is nothing preventing people to use LocomotiveCMS, the core engine remaining free of charge and we won’t force developers to sell their modules if they want them to be free.
Secondly, we do need revenues to regularly continue the development of Locomotive.
And lastly, we do like the idea to imply developers in the whole business environment.

One more thing :-) We looked for a way to sell ruby gems because all our modules will be ruby gems but we didn’t find anything.
So yes, we built our own platform named gemforsale ! For now, the marketplace functionality is not totally implemented but the basic functionalities are here.

We strongly believe that selling gems will help a lot of open source projects to generate revenues.

We are pretty excited by the way Locomotive is growing and we believe it’s going to be a major CMS soon, thanks to our users and contributors !

By the way, we’d be glad to get feedback and ideas from you.

()