Martin Dougiamas

The simplest fix, of course, is to archive your old courses on a separate install of Moodle, keeping it on the older version.

I'm so glad we have people like you at Moodle, David!

I think the key thing to focus on is what people want and where the value is.

If a plugin download exists already and it's GPL, then we all know it costs NOTHING to produce a copy of it, it's just electrons.  Any payment made for that (ie app store style) is in lieu of other things.

Other things like what?

• The investment made by the programmer to produce a first version.  Although as that's in the past we, as users, assume you found a way to do that (perhaps a paying client) so it's not strictly our problem.
  
• Support going forward, either through fixes or actual help.  For me this is the main reason that makes sense for a user to pay.  It may be that users don't want general subscriptions but to directly subscribe to a particular plugin, although it gets more complicated then ...

I don't think we need to distinguish between enhancements and bug fixes or even version porting.  A script can just look for diffs and report "no activity (0 points), some activity (5 points), significant activity (10 points)".  On months when there aren't bugs and porting to do, developers can schedule some enhancements to "keep things moving".  As long as things are happening every month we're all happy I think.  And if nothing happens one month, then a developer might get paid less - it's not the end of the world.

If a developer is gaming the system by inventing bugs then I'm pretty sure someone will notice soon enough, and that's where user feedback ratings can help.  Or even a simple "report a problem" button so David Mudrak can investigate the situation (I'm assuming it won't be often).

I like the idea of including forum support ... perhaps we can look for "helpful" ratings on replies made by the developer in the last month ... we probably can do this in the normal forums and not even worry about the content of the posts.

Firstly, I really want to help support plugin developers and to do anything we can towards this.

Secondly, I really want to keep administration minimal.

However, I'm not convinced an "app store" approach is going to work for our environment of GPL software.  There's just too many ways to circumvent it or ignore it.   There are other models out there - one I like is patreon.com 

I had a different idea just now, so I thought I'd throw it in here for discussion.  It may be doomed from the start, who knows, have a think.

Let's call it a Premium Subscription Model A:

• We have a switch in moodle.org/plugins that developers can switch a plugin to Premium.  When they do this they must give us a Paypal ID to receive money.
  
• If  user wants to access ANY of these premium plugins they need to start a Premium subscription (this could be monthly regular payments, straight into Paypal to Moodle HQ).  This gives them access to ALL premium plugins (for one Moodle site based on fixed IP) without further hassles, so it's a pretty sweet deal.
• The money collects in an account all month.  Subscription stats will be public.
• At the end of the month, Moodle HQ takes 10% for our expenses, leaving 90%.  If Premium Devs want Moodle HQ to do extra reviewing etc then it could be a bit more.
• We have a public algorithm that works out the proportion of this money that each developer should get, based on things that indicate worthiness, such as:
  
• Whether the plugin was updated in this month and by how much.
• Number of installs
• Number of updates from unique URLs
• Number/type of ratings 
• Once we know how much each developer gets, we split up the booty and automate a bunch of payments to every premium developer.

Of course the main question is what would the algorithm be to be fair and resist gaming of the system?