phil_roy wrote:
It feels slightly like a backdoor way to generate some income. I would have thought at least you would have made it a minimum donation and then left it up to others to decide.
As someone new to the Community Builder community, you missed the
strum und drag of earlier this year, as the natives agitated for the release of RC2.
While it was frustrating for the community, I'm sure it was worse for the development team.
MJ/JJ, Beat, Trail and Nant were working as hard and fast as they could, but they all still had day jobs and families. Naturally, they put those before CB.
But someone offered to pay the team to just put in this one feature. And then somebody else said that if they'd just get it out in a week (or, preferrably, the following day), why that person would throw in 10 euros. People kept talking about paying the team, but there was no organized way to achieve that, short of just random donations, which were apparently few and far between.
The team determined that they had the right to be compensated for their work and that there was an willingness in the community to pay. Rather than making CB a commercial component -- i.e., everbody has to pay -- they still release the software under open source licensing. They also provide a set of instructions (albeit skeleton) to get it up and running.
If you want more -- Nant's great detailed docs -- you pay.
I suspect that even with this money, CB is still just a sophisticated hobby for these guys. But when their family and friends ask why they're sitting in front of the computer all night, they can respond that they are
working (despite the fact that they're probably only getting paid a few cents per hour).
If you don't want to pay for the documentation -- which, again, is really good; better than 99 percent of other open source documentation -- post your questions here and they'll be answered with the collective wisdom and knowledge of the community.
Which is exactly like the vast majority of all other pieces of open source software.
\dmc
PS: Nonetheless, you do have a valid point regarding the amount of your donation. Since the threshold of the amount of a donation to get the docs had never been published before -- and since there is no automated way to "pay" for the docs -- it would seem to me that the team should make an exception in your case and to give you the authority to download. But that's just my opinion -- and I have nothing to do with CB except that I use it, visit the forums regularly and donate (somewhat infrequently).