Themes

Hi Gareth,
my +1 for your thoughts and concerns!

Matteo

Gareth, if you ever do charge for your work (and I do believe you should be entitled to charge for the development that you do) what would you do to let Moodlers/potential supporters know about it? 

Is the project list for community funding the only current option (aside from blogs run by individuals...)?

Joe

Moodle is by its nature, and by the nature of these open communities, always open to this kind of issue. I have been caught out numerous times (and I'm sure many of us have) providing free support of my time and effort only to find out later that the person I've been supporting has been paid for the work done.

My difficulty has always been where to draw the line - should the free community be supporting professional web designers who are getting paid significant amounts of money by their client? But what about the professional webdesigner who knows webdesign inside out and backwards, but is taking their first steps with Moodle at their client's request? How many 'Moodle experts' can be experts in every area of Moodle - let alone the entire field of web design!

I have usually come down on the side of providing the support (more happily if the original poster is open about the fact they are getting paid for the work so I know in advance what is happening!) after all, I support Moodle as my job, but I still need to ask questions and get support from the community and wouldn't want anyone to start thinking that they shouldn't provide that support because I get paid by my university (is that so different from being paid as a contractor in this context?)

If I am developing a theme for someone and I'm stuck, I know I can turn to the community for help and it will be freely given, because I think that is the general ethos of the Moodle/OpenSource community. I want to be able to charge for my time spent doing the work for them but I don't feel the need to restrict my code then (the client's graphics yes, but the code, no). If they want to give it away - well, I would probably have put a version with generic graphics up on github or moodle.org anyway.

I do think though that there are people who abuse that ethos - the people who only ever ask and don't give back to the community (serially and frequently), the people who take the support and work done by others and you find it coming back circuitously passed off as their own (I hope I have always credited the people I have 'borrowed' ideas and code from in my themes - I certainly try to!). Charging for support given and contributions through the forum is not always the answer in that case. Maybe attribution is - but at the same time, I know that when I provide support/code so much (all!) of it is built on what I have learned from other people, who would I expect to be attributed? me? the person I got it from? the person who came up with the original concept? Martin ?

There are opportunities to charge for work done and time spent (marketing yourself within the Moodle Partner/trademark guidelines is always the hard part!), and there are always abusers of the goodwill - as there are of any system, from open source through to commercial software pirates. Finding the right balance is tough and IMHO, as befits Moodle itself, no one-size fits all solution is going to work for everyone.

But the bottom line Gareth, is that if you (or I or Mary or anyone else) release code for free, there is nothing to stop anyone else charging for that code - if there is someone out there prepared to pay money for free stuff! That said - what are they paying for? I've been paid to install Moodle before - are they paying me for the moodle code or the time and expertise to set it up. Are they paying for Mutant Banjo (if you release it free and someone else does charge for it) or are they paying for someone's time to install it and set it up for them. For me the bigger problem, once I've released it for free is someone going through and removing all the credits and passing it off as theirs. If I've released it free, that's it, its out there, its in the wild and its there for anyone else to do what they want with, and if someone else wants to pay someone to install it fine

I've been in touch recently with someone who was paid to install my flexi_ii theme on some big .gov sites - I didn't feel cross that someone had taken my work and got paid for using it, I felt pleased and proud that my work had been deemed good enough to use on those major sites (that said the person concerned was only to happy to pass the word and the credit back to me.

Richard