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Marc Palmer: “Do we need a commercial market for Grails Plugins?”

Posted by: Robert Fischer on 12/11/2009

If you are a Grails developer who hasn’t read Marc Palmer’s blog post, “Do we need a commercial market for Grails Plugins?“, you need to do so. Now. I’ll wait.

The crux of the problem is adequately described in Marc’s GraphJam-worthy graph:

The problem is, this leads to a bunch of great ideas that are 3/4ths implemented, with lots of unimplemented great ideas still sitting around and twiddling their thumbs. (Autobase, I’m looking at you.) This does damage to the Grails ecosystem, starting with a lack of trust in plugins and ending with burnt out plugin developers angrily reclaiming their free time. So, how do we help the original developer make time for plugins, or how can we get other developers to step up and contribute (despite the consumer-developer paradigm)? That’s what Marc goes looking into, and both the original post and the comments are extremely insightful.

[PS: I'm thinking about integrating some link sharing capabilities into EnfranchisedMind so that I can queue up and share a bunch of good posts like this every month or so. Thoughts? —Admin]

[PPS: I've closed comments. Go post them on Marc's blog.—Author]

Comments

December 14, 2009, Enfranchised Mind » The Self-Destructive Side of Open Source Software wrote: [...] conversation, along with the comments on Marc’s “Do we need a commercial market for Grails Plugins?” post, suggest that there’s a bit of a misunderstanding about the economics open source [...]

This post was by Robert Fischer, written on December 11, 2009.
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About Robert Fischer

Robert Fischer is a multi-language open source developer currently specializing in Groovy in Grails. In the past, his specialties have been in Perl, Java, Ruby, and OCaml. In the future, his specialty will probably be F# or (preferably) a functional JVM language like Scala or Clojure.

Robert is the author of Grails Persistence in GORM and GSQL, a regular contributor to GroovyMag and JSMag, the founder of the JConch Java concurrency library, and the author/maintainer of Liquibase-DSL and the Autobase database migration plugin for Grails.

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