My favourite CMS used to be PyroCMS. But, although I still have a few Pyro sites hanging around, I ended up moving to WP partly because clients started asking for it and partly because Pyro was based on an old, unsupported copy of CodeIgniter. A new developer took over and completely rewrote Pyro based on Laravel. At the same time, they also moved to subscription-based licensing, charging $25 per user per month for unlimited sites in addition to 30 “first party addons”. I think a lot of people dropped out at this point, in part at least because of the charging but also because of the lack of quality addons and community support. It seems to be all but dead now.
I’d be happy to pay for a subscription-based CP and/or plugins if it means we end up with a quality alternative to WP. My only caveats are that we must ensure that a) there are plenty of quality addons available and b) the charges are “reasonable”.
A lot of careful thought needs to be given to this before going down this road.
Confirming that @ozfiddler was originally referring to paid/premium plugins. I think the title of this post may have gotten lost in translation when it was split off.
I don’t have any strong feelings either way about a paid version of ClassicPress, but, I’d stick to the free version for my own projects. I’m totally fine (though, admittedly biased) with premium plugins.
Just to clarify, personally, I would expect to have to pay for certain plugins and themes - as I’ve always done with WP - but I threw the concept of a premium version of CP into the mix because maybe it’s something that does need to be considered even if it’s just to rule it out. I don’t agree it automatically means a bullet in the head.
Regarding GPL, you wouldn’t actually be paying for the software per se. You’d be paying for enhanced support. Given that CP is intended to be a business solution, I don’t think having a community edition and a supported professional edition is a completely unreasonable (or novel) idea.
Agree with your disagreement. Hyperbole isn’t helpful. A more community-palatable option might be to offer one-click installs on ClassicPress-tuned hosting, similar to what WordPress is doing on the .com.
