[Boofo]

Originally Posted by The Geek

insane - its becoming more common to find paid vb add ons not because anyone sees dollar signs in their eyes, but because its impossible for many to continue to provide high quality work and support for free. In some cases it actually stifles further development and cause excellent coders to simply say 'cant be asked'.

What gets my goat is the cynical attitude that some users have here when 'commercial' is mentioned (almost always seems to be from those that have 0 to maybe 2 tiny releases here). These guys seem to think there is a bunch of greedy business men salivating for the chance to advertise on .org so they can go buy a new yacht. I can tell you now: There is not a lot of money in selling commercial scripts for vBulletin (maybe unless you are charging over $100 for them and selling them out the wazoo).

As far as the 'to post a commercial hack, you must do a LITE one'. Thats going to be impossible to fulfill. Its not win/win for everyone. Its win/win for those that don't have to write 2 versions of a script for those that will pay and then those that wont. Supporting 2 versions of the same script is even MORE of a nightmare (as I am quickly finding out) and as was previously mentioned - some stuff just doesn't scale to a LITE version.

In my opinion it doesn't make much sense to have 1 site for commercial addons and one for the hobbyists. This is supposed to be the ultimate vb resource, setting up a separate sight for fear that no one will make free add ons anymore is paranoid and defeats the purpose of having a resource center for owners of vBulletin. Heck, there will always be free options. In fact I just stumbled across a couple sites giving away my stuff for free (woot! I'm in the big time now! I'm being pirated!).

I don't have anything against paid hacks, although I will never pay for one. I just don't think they ought to use the org to advertise their paid hacks and use the site to get customers. It will become an epidemic overnight.

The only way I could see it ever even half-way working is to do what Wayne suggested doing a while back. To charge a percentage or fee to advertise paid hacks here. You have to spoend money to make money so there shouldn't be any problem with doing it that way. As much as I hate commercial hacks for vb (hacks, NOT coders), I could live with something like Wayne's proposal. The org is a gold-mine for anyone selling commercial hacks and we all know it. That's why this debate has been carrying on as long as it has.