I just saw this article and thinking blog about it, this article is basiclly compare PLog and MoveableType and this remind me Mark ( one of the core developer for Plog) blog about how tough is it to maintain an open source project like PLog , Mark mention it here and here ( its chinese blog click it if you can read chinese )
for the whole article i do agreed for the feature part, example the core, template, plugin , the article did mention about the strong point of PLog , but what i can’t agreed is the article focus PLog as free. Don’t keep me that in mind that open source = free , i think most of the people when talking about open source the first thing pop in their mind, i use to be like that too. Thats why Oscar ( another PLog core developer) mention that althought so many people use PLog , but the donation page they put on PLog site, its not getting more then USD$100 for the past one year.
Have some read about what is Open Source !
3 Comments
It really depends who’s their targeted audience. They should know better with publishing engines as big as MT, as popular as WP and others known for other features, it’s hard to break out in this field. They might’ve something good but in comparison with those already established ones, if it’s isn’t any difference then how do you expect people to donate. Just because it’s an Open Source project doesn’t mean you’ll get funding right away. WP is Open Source too but is doing pretty well.
Overall, I think they need to think if their Open Source was meant for the community and be strengthened by it or their ‘Open Source’ was to mainly gain revenue. If it ain’t a niche, you can’t expect much revenue.
That’s my 2 cents.
it’s time to get a marketer. Programmer is programmer. You need promotion and marketing to spread the good product.
We started plog not to make money, but to share our work with the community. The whole donation thingie and paypal account came as an afterthought, just in case felt like donating something so that we can at least have a beer or two on his/her behalf… but when I wrote about it, I mainly used as an example to show that many people want features, and expect proper and fast support in the forums but very few of them are committed to help us either with work (coding, designing, testing, etc) or with money.
As to why we think plog is better than WP or MT, it’s because plog tries to address all the shortcomings found in these two systems: plog is a free (when compared to MT) and powerful blogging tool for communities (you know, multi-user and multi-blog and very soon with featues like possibility to link to phpbb, mambo or ldap for pulling the user data, etc), which is a completely different “target audience” than WP. Plog is not just a blogging tool but a whole platform on top of which users can build new and exciting communities and that’s what we are going to stress in future releases… Hopefully we’ll succeed, but we’ve got all the time in the world
Btw, we already have a marketing guy. He’s mainly concentrated on the European “market” and so far it’s going very well… articles published in PHP Magazine (both German and English edition), many brief articles in several important sites, etc. Perhaps we should get somebody to focus on the Asian market?