This way VM-Staff isn’t responsible for payment, tax or law topics.
There are other downsides, I think, as it could be fairly easy to damage VIrtualmin reputation by a bunch of poorly written modules (plugins).
Also, each plugin written would have to be audited by @Jamie, @Joe and myself.
Developers who provide their code, and customers who need special modules.
Even though we encourage people writing plugins for Virtualmin in theory, in practice it is a fairly difficult task, and I personally, haven’t seen any useful and well written Virtualmin plugin yet. It is probably because there is no marketplace available yet, for potential developers to get a profit from.
Users see what modules exist, and can easily found somebody who actively maintain it and give payed support if needed
Also, it is not clear how to deal with the situation if a developer creates a plugin presenting a functionality that is already been in our agenda or something we’ve been already working on?
By the way, could anyone point out at least one, well maintained (not by us) Virtualmin plugin?
That’s our problem and the developers…not really a customer problem. I don’t have a problem with people competing on core functionality, even. If we don’t do something better with our own platform, that’s our failing. I know there are a couple of application installers that work on Virtualmin, which kinda hurts my feelings (since one of the primary features people pay for Pro to get is our long list of installable applications, and I’d like to think we do it better than the others who do it), but even that I wouldn’t want to stop. We want a great platform, even if all the money the platform makes doesn’t come to us.
As I mentioned, I’d be willing to write some code to make a marketplace come together, however this is really dependent upon progress in terms of the idea coming together.
At the moment, I simply hear a lot of bickering about whether the idea has merit or not.
I’ve put one request out there which still hasn’t been acted upon, “a list of plugins that have already been built”…
For those who are interested in making this happen, let’s start to come together and “get er’ done!”
But that could happen by ignoring it as any developer/agent could produce a plugin (at least in theory) make it available to be searched (Googled) and then installed on top of Virtualmin.
If poorly written or tested it is even more likely to damage the reputation of Virtualmin if ignored by the community/staff than if there is an accepted place to discuss/support it here?
I still think discussing the addition of payment/ licencing is beyond the simple addition of step 1 (providing somewhere to inform). We all could be discussing something that doesn’t even exist (vapourware) may not exist for a long time to come. Like any software it has to be driven by someone with time to spare, the knowledge of how to achieve it, and perhaps the desire/incentive to complete it.
Of course it then requires support and maintenance. Over the years I have seen many a project die because no one knew it existed, or really needed it in the first place.
Perhaps the real problem is “We do not know what is being worked on” or how significant that plugin might be (is it even required?). What is even desired beyond bugfix/maintenance/documentation/help desk?
There is a great deal of Virtualmin that I do not use, have no use for, do not even know it is there to use but keep coming back here to learn something new and might find a use for.