Need Joomla SEF? Get your wallet.

Comment by Nathan Bohn on January 19, 2010 at 9:23am

I would agree very much in that who controls it dictates the feeling towards the $ listed. But maybe im just crying into my milk over the whole thing.

Comment by Birger J. Nordølum on January 19, 2010 at 10:52am

May I recommend I look at AceSEF?

Comment by Nathan Bohn on January 19, 2010 at 10:57am

I was able to find a developer who was working on a forked version of sh404sef. and was hosting the last available sh404sef release. AQSG

Comment by Nathan Bohn on January 19, 2010 at 11:26am

Brian I was very interested to see if you would respond. As I was writing I was thinking to myself, "Myself, I hope I dont offend Mr. T."
Anywho, I see the changelog is getting longer, and I am glad they are not just ignoring their new acquisition. So maybe I am just complaining because im just too cheap, or maybe its just because I like complaining about one of my favorite toys being behind a pay-wall.

Comment by Yannick Gaultier on January 19, 2010 at 11:28am

Hi all

Glad to see sh404sef mentioned here :) I think I am in a good position to shed some light on some aspects of this discussion, so first about the facts, then maybe a few comments :

- I have been the developer of sh404sef for the last 4 years. Over the first 8 months of 2009, I lost the ability to spend 25 to 30 hours per week developing and supporting users, in addition to my day job. This resulted in no update to sh404sef for close to a year.
Eventually, I called it quit, and then decided to try keep the project alive, working with Victor @anything digital. We did a one month trial and there was enough people happy with the move so that we kep t going. I am now Victor's partner. I don't know where you got the idea that I was to leave or anything like that. Please provide source. Quite the contrary, I have now also took over development of JCal pro, anything digital other extension

It seems some people believe sh404sef was sold or was taken over by Anything Digital. That is not the case. I am the one controlling it. The software, including new one, is my (c). I am not going anywhere.

- One of the main objective I had was that the extension remained GPL. That was already the case for Anything Digital extensions.

- Price level : the business model sounded fair to me. sh404sef is sold for $35 for a year worth of updates, with no restrictions on number of sites or anything. I have a hard time believing users in most countries can consider this a high price. I know $35 is a high price in some places, and I have addressed this on my blog's comment. The short story is : I have no solution for that.. But again, it is very hard for me to understand anyone saying $35 for a year, unlimited web site is a high price

BTW, can you tell me where you got those stange figures of $35 for 2 and 6 months ????

- as for quality of support : the main idea was that Anything Digital people would handle some support, so that I can get away with it. There was a difficult start, because sef extensions are special : most problems are in other people software or in web servers setup. It is quite a difficult piece of software to support and it took times before we could find an organization that works. It does work now, and has been for a while.

- despite the fact that I spend more time in support that I had hoped, what I did hope for happened : there was 5 or 6 releases since september 2009. The bug fixing is over, and I have now started again adding new, innovative features, as in last release.

Comments :

- I know it is not nice to go from free to pay. There was no option for me, I just did not have the ability to handle what sh404sef had become - 650 downloads a day, 50+ daily posts on the forum, with me doing most of the answers and reasearch work. Not going commercial would have resulted in the death of the project. I don't have to remind you of SmartSef, for instance. As for Joomace, the ironic element in it is that Denis has been making money for quite some time selling sh404sef plugins (and still does).
I feel significant that despite announcements, no fork is in sight 5 month later.

- I basically think some of your thinking about sh404sef is based on either incorrect or outdated information. Please feel free to contact me directly or publicly if you have any specific question

Cheers all

Comment by Yannick Gaultier on January 19, 2010 at 11:30am

@Nathan : again, just to make it clear : there was no acquisition of any sort from Anything Digital. They don't own anything. This is GPL, how could they own anything anyway ?

Comment by Nathan Bohn on January 19, 2010 at 11:40am

Yannick, I truly did not intend to create a "Yannick is so evil" post. I can definitely understand the need for more help, and can even understand you selling it to others. I very well may have done the same in your position. I was trying to more so push the question out about the Joomla ecosystem. Perhaps poorly worded, i was trying to discuss the idea of extension developers being able to be supported by their developments rather than just giving them away for free. Hence the free vs less than everyone else thought.

I did not research well enough that is true, but I had missed the transition (i guess it happened last year?) and so was trying to track down what happened.

I am not faulting you for your actions, because it sounds like you did what was best for the project. I guess its like this. If Ubuntu started charging $20 for their OS. sure $20 isnt that much, and it would be worth every penny. However it would be remembered as this great piece of software that did as much and even more than some paid software but was free. Despite being a good business model.

I just think that the Open Source Movement is seen too often as just free (as in beer) and when I have to pay for something it cheapens it a little. But please dont feel as though I blame you for anything. thanks!

Comment by Yannick Gaultier on January 19, 2010 at 1:10pm

Hi Leo
Thanks for your welcome (and also the nice words :) ). I am trying to find my ways around here. Interesting place to be in. Amy sure knows about animating a community. I whished I had registered earlier.

Leo, you obviously had a bad experience with AD. It seems you are very much focused on the support terms displayed when downloading, but I understand this is really a GPL thing, and there is nothing to do about it. I have asked Victor to provide more background about it, as this is not my "cup of tea" - literral translation of a French saying, at least it should please Brian
You know the funny thing : before answering, I quickly tried to go to some GPL commercial extensions to check out their terms. Well, not that easy to find any. And those I found basically have the same terms, or no terms. As said, not my part, so Victor should bring some material later on.

@Nathan. No sweat, nothing personnal. You should look at the comments on my blog at the old sh404sef site. I've had the full spectrum. We're having a nice civilized discussion here :)

However, besides Anything Digital terms, I think the topic you raised is interesting. I have always been having a difficulty with the GPL, which has many benefits, but with one curious drawback : on most occasions, it will prevent developers to make a living from what they do : developing.
Most commercial GPL ventures are about selling support, selling manual, selling other things. Not just selling the product that you manufacture.
At the time of the big GPL discussions, I have seen many questions asked about a GPL business model, but not so many answers. And now many of the large commercial extensions are not GPL like Jomsocial or Joomsef.
I just hope we can succeed at A.D and be able to sustain that business model of a real GPL commercial extension set.

Comment by Victor Drover on January 19, 2010 at 2:13pm

Hi all. Most of you know me as the owner of Anything Digital. I welcome a discussion on commercial GPL business models and in particular our place in the Joomlasphere.

For some history, we picked up and developed JCal Pro (formerly Extcalendar 2) when it was abandoned. We put in tonnes and tonnes of time for no return into making this project viable and on on 22-Nov-2006, JCal Pro 1.0 was first released. I am not a skilled programmer, and for about a year paid all the programming costs out-of-pocket.

This model was unsustainable and we moved to a commercial GPL model on 22-July-2007. To my knowledge, this was the first commercial GPL model for Joomla, and on the shoulders of this great experiment, I believe we helped start a mass-migration of developers who were otherwise alienated and frustrated at the OSM decision to enforce a strict GPL policy (officially announced on June 14, 2007).

Yannick, the sh404sef author, had been working with me for some time and his story is similar (see above). After developing sh404SEF for 3 years for free, it became unsustainable. A commercial GPL model made sense, and very soon will allow Yannick to develop full-time. Already, he is more and more attentitive to both development and support.

As far as guarantees and support, the GPL requires us to state we can't guarantee that the extension will work or be suitable. We cannot and would not want to cherry pick the GPL for the terms which suit us most favorably.

Some of these terms protect the software authors from liability, and so they are critical to running a successful business. Section 15 for example:

15. Disclaimer of Warranty.

THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.

Perhaps the most important thing to note is that all GPL extensions are governed by these terms, and I think extension providers have a responsibility to clearly display them. We take this point seriously and you will find these terms displayed at every point of download on our web site.

Despite these liability protections and caveats, it is irresponsible to distribute extensions and not support them. Thus, we indeed employ staff to work the forums, even though we are not required to do so. We also provide 1-on-1 support when warranted. Extensions such as sh404SEF are particularly difficult to support (as Yannck noted above) because variations in sever configuration greatly affect performance. Supporting the mass of Joomla extensions is also a struggle. As a result, we will not always be successful, and training new staff can lead to temporary issues in support quality. Even so, bugs identified in the forum are flagged, added to our tracker and prioritized for fixing in further releases.

In short, we are required to distribute the software "as is", but spend a lot of time, energy and money in supporting and improving our applications.

I encourage you all to try the older release linked above. You'll note that nothing has been done for this 'fork' since the author posted it in October. You can also find sh404 on warez sites (is that what you would sell to someone? a release from a warez site??). However, we know that our customers trust us for development and secure, reliable releases, and we'd not have it any other way.

That said, all young companies make mistakes. And the good ones strive to do better. That's where we are, striving for greatness. Hopefully some of you reading this will stick around to see our full potential.

Comment by Amy Stephen on January 19, 2010 at 2:35pm

I just wish Joomla!'s URLs didn't suck.

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