Has JME considered offering premium support?

Development
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Hey, Erlend Heggen suggested I post here, hope this finds you well.

Have you considered offering premium paid one-on-one support to jMonkeyEngine users?

There’s 11k messages in “General Help”, what if 1% of those people wanted help enough to pay for it?

Would a team-based premium support platform (via paid browser conferencing) be useful to your project?

What would you want it to do?

I made something like this for OS developers and was looking for feedback. I’d like to make independent open source sustainable by making independent os devs wealthy. I haven’t used JME, but I do use Meteor which I think powers your forums.

Anyways, what do you think? Thanks for your time :slight_smile:

Mike

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This may be a situation where folks can’t afford to pay for something that they get for free.

Personally, I’m open to the idea and have offered to quote people contract rates on the forum before when they demand I write code for them. The issue is that I’m quite expensive compared to what their expectations might be. You’ll likely get some class of poster willing to work for less and they will probably just post questions for the things they don’t know directly to the forum… someone is bound to get touchy about that eventually.

When I work one-on-one for someone then it’s a job. When I post answers for everyone, it’s altruism.

That’s why I’ve opted for a patreon account ( https://www.patreon.com/pspeed42?ty=h ). Deciding to buy me a doughnut for doing something voluntarily is different than negotiating a rate ahead of time for a potentially bottomless hole of real work.

That being said, anyone who wants to engage me directly (within the heavy constraints on my time), I can quote contractor rates… at that point ‘medium’ isn’t a problem, though.

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I personally think that this would ruin jME’s sucess. If questions are only answered privately, everybody will ask the same questions, for they don’t know someone else already asked it. For the Devs this would result in a lot of money, but the community would suffer of it.
Bad support → no newcomers.
I startedd using jME for 2 reasons:

  1. It wasn’t Unity
  2. People said it had good support

There are also people who start their own engine after testing/playing with jME, what results in less people.
Leavers + no newcomers → small community

I do like what wikipedia does: they only ask for donations.
If there’d be an option to donate, enough people would do that.

This is my OPINION and REASONING, not advice or command or something.

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I’m pretty sure, there was (and still is) an option - I think some years ago we talked about spending the donated money on professional assets, but since they weren’t redistributable as demo-assets for free, the only option left was to just buy them for rendered demo scenes (to show off the engine and what is is capable of, given the right resources).
There is some thread lying around somewhere in the forum^^ (Also, normen’s 2nd usecase video is about importing some of the purchased game-ready assets, if I remember correctly)

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I don’t like the idea, Google trialled something similar, and found it ineffective, now not exactly the same thing, I think it’s similar enough, and if Google couldn’t get it to work …

I think being part of a free open source community, making monetary contributions can only ever be optional, never mandatory, to get access to information.

I like @pspeed’s patreon model… If someone helps you out heaps, throw them a few bux if you want. I know if someone gave me some $ for good support, I would be extremely willing to help that person out more in the future, and the circle of positivity continues.

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That’s only personal achievement. Devs may compete against each other, although that’s very unlikely. To eliminate all chance of competition, a common patreon should be made and the money split (like Marxism / Communism).

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what’s wrong with devs competing to provide the best service ? Why should the money be evenly split when the effort is not.

perhaps a compromise, personal patreon’s so an individual can be rewarded for their efforts, and a community patreon where the money is used to pay for server upkeep, competition prizes, advertising etc ???

(and Patreon may not be the best model for this, it’s just the buzz word of the topic so I will keep using it)

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Split how? Among all the members? Among the members who have been active on the forum in the last week? Among the community that has been most helpful on the forum in the last week?

…the nice thing about individual patreon accounts is that it covers all of that. The core devs never see the pooled money as it’s used to maintain the site and stuff… and there is already a way to donate to that.

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Hey, this is great, thanks!

I saw the Patreon gets about $27/month. I’m also a freelance dev, and a portion of that wouldn’t honor much of my time. I did an OS Project that I eventually abandoned because I couldn’t pay my rent. It was a hard choice, and I wanted something more sustainable for OS devs.

I wouldn’t suggest replacing the forums with premium support. Forums and community support have alot to offer. This would be adding additional support. I can’t speak for other people, but if I was helping someone and found a documentation issue or a bug, I’m way more likely to fix it then, compared to a forum post, or milking it for cash.

Actually, Google Helpouts was the inspiration. They shut it down, and honestly, they did it wrong. Not everything benefits from search, a marketplace, and a strong core brand. They are smart people, but not everything needs a hammer.

Re: teams and competing devs. I pictured a team-based platform. There would be one landing page where people made requests. Then a team of devs work together to help people when they can.

Would a team-based platform be interesting? Do you think you’d be able to attract more core contributors if they could support that work?

TBH, I already built a platform for this and would be happy to share if you’re interested. I think there’s a place in the world for independent full-time open source developers. Premium support is the best I could come up with. My goal is to reduce the friction.

Choosing a framework or engine is a long-term relationship. I’d honestly be more likely to pick one if it offered a way to get support from the devs, w/o an enterprise support contract.

What would be the obstacles to trying it?

Thanks!

Mike

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Maybe relevant:

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monkeys are so awesome

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But that’s kind of my point… patreon isn’t paying me. It’s a way of saying thanks for something that I would already have been doing for free anyway. Like when you buy lunch for the friend who helps you move… versus paying $X/hour for real movers.

I answer questions on the forum because I want to. (Altruism, philanthropy, whatever) Getting a “tip” is nice but not necessary. It means maybe I take a little less hit when I buy that Game Engine Gems book or whatever.

But don’t get me wrong… if your paid platform can net me $200/hour and won’t detract from the forum AT ALL. Then sure, let’s give it a shot. Else I’ll keep doing for free what people can’t afford to pay for.

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LOL! That is a pissed off monkey!

So, pricing. A project owner would set the price on the landing page for all support requests. Then link to the landing page from wherever people go to find help. Each dev keeps the money earned from the people they help. There’s a couple other ideas here, but that’s the simplest.

I think gift economies are great, and I honor those choices. This isn’t a replacement for free support. We have a natural urge to help people called compassion, and I’d frankly like to see a new economy around that. But I’m still paying rent and companies use OS to make lots of money.

I also experience an OS support gap between filing an issue and having a support contract. I make money freelancing for companies that make money using open source. I can’t think of a project in the last 20 years that hasn’t used OS, and I can’t tell you how many 2-day dead-end’s I’ve been down that would have been solved with 30 mins from the developer. Many projects have more money than time.

@pspeed, if you regularly charge $200/hr and people see the value in that, there’s absolutely no reason you couldn’t find new paying clients for you and the people in your network. As a freelancer, finding new clients has always been a huge investment of my time that bills at $0/hr.

Do you think there are people using JME that would want one-on-one help and value that help with money?

Mike

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As I recall when UDK was first opened up, you could use it for free, but you needed to pay for a licence to access proper dev support, so I guess there is a precedent out there.

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@thetoucher Yeah, I don’t think people expect free dev face time - unless it’s a hackathon or free code camp. It’s really a new opportunity for small-medium sized projects that weren’t getting one-on-one support.

Anyways, if you’re curious, I’d love to do a demo. Or maybe it would be useful on another project. I want independent OS devs to be wealthy! It’s free to sign up: https://bigSmall.io

Well, thanks for the feedback and happy Cinco de Mayo!

Mike

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In my opinion this will probably destroy the essence of the engine,
there are already plenty of paid premium support engines with similar or better feature set.

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