New Version of Autobase: Payware?

By Robert Fischer | Published: October 27, 2009

Since nobody’s come out of the woodwork to fund the Autobase Grails plugin, but that plugin desperately needs a new version and extensions, so I’m considering working on it over the holidays and releasing it early next year as payware, or perhaps under a GPL/payware scheme a la Zed Shaw’s GPL approach or Clojure’s use of the SCA. Note that using a plugin under the GPL will GPL your code by extension.

I don’t want Autobase to stagnate and die, but I also can’t afford to be burning time on something that won’t produce money in some form: grad school is sucking up all that kind of time.

Thoughts?

Related posts:

  1. Autobase Released
  2. BackgroundThread and Autobase on GrailsPodcast
  3. Open Source Journaling: Autobase v0.8.1
  4. Presenting Groovy, Grails, BackgroundThread, and Autobase at TriJUG
  5. Grails Retainer
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  • http://hamletdarcy.blogspot.com Hamlet D\’Arcy

    integrate a text based nag screen so that users must type something into the console for their migrations to succeed. you could have some sweet ascii art in it too.

    perhaps someone else has a better idea ;)

  • http://www.smokejumperit.com Robert Fischer

    I’m totally going to rock the sweet ASCII art. :)

  • http://jroller.com/aalmiray Andres Almiray

    Will it include unicorn ASCII art? seriously, go for it.

  • http://www.grailsblog.com Dean Del Ponte

    I’m surprised no company is willing to step up and pay you to work on it. Well managed database alterations are an integral part of deployment.

    • http://www.smokejumperit.com Robert Fischer

      You and me both, Dean. Is your company interested?

      To the more general audience: Should I warn the Grails community about this plan and give someone a chance to step up and fund its development?

  • http://hamletdarcy.blogspot.com Hamlet D’Arcy

    maybe the idea of paying someone to clean their own toilet they set out in their front yard themselves is off putting to some enterprises?

  • http://www.smokejumperit.com Robert Fischer

    1) That post came out long after Autobase was released. And if people don’t want to pay me to work on Autobase, that’s fine, but then the improvements/work is catch-as-catch-can.
    2) Adoption of Autobase doesn’t seem to be the problem. People contributing back up-stream is the problem.

  • http://jsmag.com Michael Kimsal

    It would probably not matter to too many people if it was payware as long as the pricing was reasonable. I want to say you set up a different set of expectations when you charge money for something, but I get the feeling that many people basically expect you to fix all their issues for them anyway.

    An in-depth autobase piece for GroovyMag would certainly net you a small writer’s fee – probably not enough to live on for any length of time, but good for a few Chinese dinners. :)

  • http://www.smokejumperit.com Robert Fischer

    @Michael

    I’ll do an Autobase article as I’m rewriting it: you can publish it as I announce the new system. The new rewrite should enable some cool stuff, and if I’m doing the charging thing, I’m going to do Autobase right.

  • http://javidjamae.com Javid Jamae

    If you’re going to do the work anyways, why not finish it, write about what it can do and show examples, but don’t release it until the community pays you $X on a donation page. Once your quota has been met, then you release it (but not GPL). You can have a nice meter that shows people how far away they are from using your cool software. ;)

    • http://twitter.com/RobertFischer Robert Fischer

      @Javid

      Well, I wasn’t planning on doing the work anyway. Although that’s an interesting approach.

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