My 2p worth: Open source is great, but I don’t really care that much for myself because I will never, ever look at the code, and there’s no guarantee that EE would continue, or continue in the right hands afterwards. I pay money for it because the basic system is great, and the last year has seen nothing but really cool additions in the form of things like the Forum and Wiki module that have been really good quality out of the gate - no ‘should I install this 0.02b beta’ version’ worries. The system at the moment works great for what I need of it, so while I’m oh-so-very-happy to see updates, and discounting security problems, my site could go on running just fine even if Pmachine disappeared tomorrow.
Some posters seemed to be hung up on the open vs. closed source aspect, and the fear that a closed-source software company can stop development at any time.
As someone who has used pmachine pro for a number of years, that is a valid concern, considering pmachine DOES have a track record of stopping development of a closed-source product. They will point out that they offered reduced-price upgrade options to EE, but if you already have a developed site and you were faced with having to redesign your site using a new software system and reimporting all your back articles, such upgrade pricing may be very secondary to the time an effort required to start over.
I am not trying to be negative or confrontational to the pmachine folks because they make an OUTSTANDING product and have provided me SUPERIOR customer service over the years, but whether a product is going to be around is an important matter, and this company does have a track record of pulling a popular product in favor of another, so that is a factor you have to consider when you go with their product.
I understand and agree with Paul’s comments about being able to eat, but with that said, I still find the licensing not quite right. I think there should be more flexibility in the pricing. They install the free version of EE with hosting accounts, of which I have, so I think they should offer the paid versions of EE as a monthy upgrade option. Instead of paying $250 one shot, you pay a monthly premium on top of your hosting for the backend software and that would include upgrades as long as you host the account with them. The major problem I do have with their pricing is that even if I pay $100 for their software, I still cannot use it for commercial purposes. I think if I paid for it, I should be able to use for what I want to use it for.
I have also used textpattern and find it to be a pretty good solution (though a little confusing at first), but I am actually considering using EE Core on a new personal site. I would like to use it on my commercial sites, but “commercial” does not always mean “profitable” so I can’t justify the price for those. But I think if you want something that offers a true integrated solution, EE is probably the way to go, if your budget allows. If your budget does not allow, I would certainly recommend textpattern also, so for me I think if you are starting a new site, it is more a matter of your budget than anything else and what you want to achieve.
They will point out that they offered reduced-price upgrade options to EE, but if you already have a developed site and you were faced with having to redesign your site using a new software system and reimporting all your back articles, such upgrade pricing may be very secondary to the time an effort required to start over.
Not really. They provided a nice update path, in terms of investment of both money and time. And you can still download the product (it’s actually free now), and use it forever if you’re so inclined. Really, I don’t see how they could’ve handled that any better.
I think there should be more flexibility in the pricing. They install the free version of EE with hosting accounts, of which I have, so I think they should offer the paid versions of EE as a monthy upgrade option. Instead of paying $250 one shot, you pay a monthly premium on top of your hosting for the backend software and that would include upgrades as long as you host the account with them.
Take it up with pmachinehosting. No, they are not the same company. It’s an interesting idea, and I don’t see why that shouldn’t work. They only problem is that, if you decide to walk away after a month (or three), you could take (a copy of) the software with you, so this would probably need to be some sort of protected version, akin to the 30-day trial. Personally, I’d find that unacceptable, but your needs may differ.
The major problem I do have with their pricing is that even if I pay $100 for their software, I still cannot use it for commercial purposes. I think if I paid for it, I should be able to use for what I want to use it for.
Sorry, but that’s not how software works. All your uses are subject to the license agreement you have with the vendor. The alternative would be to charge every customer the higher price.
I would like to use it on my commercial sites, but “commercial” does not always mean “profitable” so I can’t justify the price for those.
Well, it means “with the intent of making money, or supporting such a venture”. Otherwise it’s not commercial. And being “profitable”: well, that’s the risk of doing business. It would be nice not having to pay for electricity, or rent, etc if the venture fails, but that’s not how things work.
But I think if you want something that offers a true integrated solution, EE is probably the way to go, if your budget allows.
I don’t know about your projects, but in most of mine the cost of EE has been a negligible factor.
Since you decided to respond to my comments in the manner you did, I thought I would respond in kind:
They provided a nice update path, in terms of investment of both money and time. And you can still download the product (it’s actually free now), and use it forever if you’re so inclined. Really, I don’t see how they could’ve handled that any better.
Actually there is a whole pmachine pro forum filled with people that were very upset at the time with the way they handled the shut down of pmachine pro. I am actually a paid user of pmachine pro and could use it for commercial purposes. After making an investment in that software and the time to learn it, design a site around it, and post articles to it, I did not feel that I should have to turn around and start all over JUST because they decided they wanted to go another way. Yes, they offered a generous crossgrade price, something I conceded, but I think you are being disingenuous when you suggest that people that put a significant amount of time into a project would not have to reinvest much of that time all over in order to have a site with backend software that is continually updated. Yes, you could use it forever, theoretically, but software does need updating from time to time to deal with new realities. As for it being free, it is, but for non-commercial use. As for how they could have handled it better…they could have made the software open source and then others could have taken over and kept it updated at least for the core group of users still out there who were not in a position to switch over.
Take it up with pmachinehosting. No, they are not the same company. It’s an interesting idea, and I don’t see why that shouldn’t work.
I know they are separate. I have been a customer of these people for 4 years. However, they obviously work together, so I don’t see the point of your comment at all. I wasn’t making a feature request, I was merely suggesting other ways they could offer the product for people that could not afford to pay for it upfront. I don’t think the software is super expensive in the big picture, but compared to open source solutions that do largely the same thing (which is the whole point of the thread) and is free, the cost is rather expensive. I guess a good example of someone that has adopted this model is Typepad.
Sorry, but that’s not how software works. All your uses are subject to the license agreement you have with the vendor.
Of course they are free to place any kind of restriction they like, I didn’t say they couldn’t. I am just saying that for me, I don’t like the fact they choose to make it that restrictive and that is something that makes me not buy the software. As I mentioned above, I am a licensed pmachine pro user, and my license came with a commercial use. So I am not sure why someone that pays $100 for the product they have out now can’t use it for commercial purposes. I would be more willing to pay $100 if it came with a commercial license, but they took out some of the modules or features in the $250 version. Then if you needed the more robust version you could just upgrade. I think the licensing model they have is not the best way for them to go. IMHO.
It would be nice not having to pay for electricity, or rent, etc if the venture fails, but that’s not how things work.
Well, that is how open source software works, its free, and that was the point of the thread comparing EE to free open source alternative textpattern, not electricity, rent and water. So, I am not asking for a free lunch. I was a PAID user of pmachine software long before most. So, obviously, I don’t have a problem paying, but I do, when you are overly restrictive with the licensing of a paid product, when the product category you occupy is littered with free alternatives…alternatives I have chosen for commercial sites because of licensing.
I don’t know about your projects, but in most of mine the cost of EE has been a negligible factor.
I am sure that is the case. You probably develop sites for others, and you are talented, so you get top dollar, so EE is cheap in that scenario, and the way I would definitely go if I were you. But the sites I have developed have been largely for me, not for paying third party clients, so the time I spend developing the site is the most expensive part. Again, when compared to the other backend solutions, in this case textpattern, EE is more than a neglible cost for me. I am the one paying and if I can find a software that does what I need it to do, and it is less expensive, for me that is the way to go.
Now, with all that said, I DO think EE is better than textpattern. For someone like you that is developing expensive sites, you would be foolish to go any other way, but for those on a limited budget that have sites that are not mere personal diary blogs, but do serve some “commercial” purpose even if it is used for a simple customer newsletter or something and is not designed to generate revenue on its own like a subscription or ecommerce site, the licensing terms of the EE product does make choosing an open source alternative that is less restrictive on use a good alternative. Believe me, if I develop a site with a real budget, I am going to go with EE. If EE is offered at the $100 with a commercial license, then I am there now with my small site, but unfortunately, $250 is rich for my blood when I have a commercial site operating just fine with a free open source alternative.
As for it being free, it is, but for non-commercial use.
Is that so? EE Core is not to be used for commercial websites, but pM Pro? The licence certainly doesn’t mention any restriction of that kind. I think this used to be the case with pM Free, but that’s been withdrawn altogether and replaced with pM Pro.
So, obviously, I don’t have a problem paying, but I do, when you are overly restrictive with the licensing of a paid product, when the product category you occupy is littered with free alternatives…alternatives I have chosen for commercial sites because of licensing.
Sorry, but mentioning the EE license and “overly restrictive” in one sentence just doesn’t make much sense to me. While it’s not exactly the GPL, the EE license is the most clearcut, lenient, to-the-point license of any commercial software I have seen so far. So, you may of course continue to use TP, or WP, or MT, or Typo3. Or whatever. For non-commercial products I have used WP and MT in the past myself, but since EE Core arrived on the scene I do that exclusively. I’m OK with the license, the support is great, and my commercial customers don’t mind paying a few bucks for such a product. But to each his own, of course, and I understand your needs are different.
But the sites I have developed have been largely for me, not for paying third party clients
If EE is offered at the $100 with a commercial license, then I am there now with my small site, but unfortunately, $250 is rich for my blood when I have a commercial site operating just fine with a free open source alternative.
I don’t understand smth. here.
An EE developer wrote in the forum:
Two simple questions can help you determine what type of license you need.
1. Is the primary purpose of the site to make money?
2. Is the purpose of the site to support a legal business or professional service in any way?
If you answer yes to either of the above then you need a Commercial license.
So, for example, a non-profit taking donations, a personal site selling a t-shirt with the domain on it, etc… are all personal licenses.
That (the final line) means your website may do business with $100 Personal Licence with some restrictions regarding your incomes.
You don’t need to pay $250 immediately if your website sells “etc.” & earns $10 a months to pay for your hosting.
If the primary purpose of the site is to make money, for example, $250 a month (net income), you can earn the necessary amount & buy the Commercial License in a month without any problems (or in 3 month, if you get $100 a month).
If your website cannot earn $250 at all, it sells either “a t-shirt with the domain on it”, or the above “etc.” That is not a commercial website. That is a personal website.
I don’t understand why you use a commercial license if your website doesn’t earn $250 (or $100) a month. You can use your $100 website with all functions of the $250 one.
while this is a good discussion with some interesting points being made its no longer really about EE vs. TP. Its about our pricing, etc… So I’m going to make a closing comment here, give some time for those who want to respond, and then close the thread.
Doug, the only thing I want to clarify here is that you make it sound like we (pMachine) had some sort of master plan to stop pMachine Pro development and force upgrades to ExpressionEngine.
This is not even close to the truth. It was our original plan to offer EE has a 2nd product that would co-exist along side pMachine Pro. pM Pro would be our “low end” solution for personal bloggers and EE would be our “high end product” for people who wanted more of a CMS that also did blogging very well. EE’s purpose, from the beginning, was to bridge the gab between a blogging tool and a CMS.
Part of the reason we started developing EE at all was because people were hacking pMachine Pro to bits and forcing pM Pro to be a CMS. Then, with every release of pM Pro, we’d get complaints that all these wonderful hacks would break. After reviewing pM Pro’s code and how a significant portion of people were trying to use pM Pro we realized that the best decision would be to come up with a new product that took flexibility and growth into account from the very beginning, something that we didn’t with pM Pro, which was sort of an accidental commercial success (remember, pM Pro started life because Rick wrote up a small script for one site, not because someone thought to launch a product, made business plans, etc….).
Thus was born EE out of a strong desire from our community for a blog/CMS product that simply didn’t exist yet. We thought that by pricing EE’s Personal license at $149 (that’s what a Personal license originally cost) that people who just wanted to blog would still use pM Pro, which was only $45. We were wrong. Very wrong.
Within a few short months of releasing EE nobody was buying pM Pro anymore and it simply became financially impossible to continue its development. We kept it going even after we knew we were losing money on it for as long as we could. We didn’t open source it for a number of reasons, the most important of which was simply lack of demand. During the transition from pMachine Pro to EE we barely got a handful of requests to keep pMachine Pro alive and out of those, less than 15 demanded a refund (which we gave). So out of the thousands of sites using pMachine Pro less than 1% of our community asked us to do anything different then what we were doing.
In the end our decision to stop pM Pro was simply a response to the community, who had already decided to stop using it. It would have been a disservice to the community to invest resources into a product that was virtually dead when the vast, vast majority wanted more EE as fast as they could get it. They still do (we’re going as fast as we can folks, I promise)!
We know this stranded a few people so we did the best we could. Even after we stopped feature development on pM Pro we continued to fix any reported bugs and immediately address any security issues for more than a year (we would still address security issues reported). This is why there were several small point releases after “development” ceased on pMachine Pro. Its also why we decided to give it away for free. Even at “free” there is little interest in pM Pro at this point. Virtually nobody downloads it. We only get 3 types of downloaders at this point. First are a few folks that have had a web host illegally install it on their account. Second, we get a few folks where the web host has installed a super-old version that they were legally allowed to (why web hosts won’t stop doing that is beyond me). And finally there are some non-profits that occasionally use it. We keep it available only for that 3rd group and past users.
So that’s the story. There was no plot or greedy plan or even a good intentioned plan to move people away from pMachine Pro. Its simply what happened.
Sorry for commenting on the EE forums. Will not make that mistake again. I think if you read my original comments they were addressing a concern raised that a closed source project could be pulled from the market. I pointed out that was a valid concern since pmachine did do that. I did not dwell on it, but it is a fact and something I said someone should consider when they choose a software platform, including yours. My comments were directly on point with the thread.
As for accusing pmachine of being “greedy” and launching a “master plan”, there could be nothing further from the truth and coming from someone that is associated with the company, strikes me as pretty defensive and outrageous. If you read my original post, I do nothing but praise pmachine for both their product and their customer support. I remember my customer support coming from rick directly, and could not believe how fast it was considering he was the one developing it and basically supporting it back at the beginning. Whatever success Rick enjoys from this venture, it is well-deserved.
I also agreed and understood what Paul was saying was the need to charge for the product. I just offered a suggestion that offering a typepad-like service for lack of a better comparison could make a great option for businesses on a budget. The last time I looked at typepad, they had many big businesses paying for hosted services that are very affordable. I understand that EE is better and all that, all I was making was a suggestion.
As for the commercial license thing, the only thing I said on that was I could not afford to pay it. It’s great that all of you can. And for that I am attacked as a loser who cannot afford to pay for software, even though I was one of the original people that paid for the software that bears this company’s name.
I guess the point I was trying to make is that if a company, a “commercial” enterprise, wanted to start a blog aimed at its customers, and a manager was faced with the choice of choosing wordpress or textpattern let’s say, for free, and paying $250 for an EE commercial use license, they would probably go with the free options, if budgets are a concern. Now if a company wanting to allow its employees or departments to create simple customer oriented blogs can be done with the free version or the $99 version of EE, then I stand corrected on that point.
nobody at pMachine is calling you a loser I’m not sure where you got that from. In fact, some of the things you bring up, like a pay-as-you go service are very interesting and have started some internal chatter here.
Your subsequent posts do claim that we have a “track record of pulling a product” and “As for how they could have handled it better…they could have made the software open source and then others could have taken over and kept it updated at least for the core group of users still out there who were not in a position to switch over.” Those are the points that I wanted to address. Because you’re such a long-time community member I wanted to give you the whole story out of courtesy and as a thank you for being around for so long. You seem to have gotten the opposite impression and I apologize for that.
Given the story of why pMachine Pro stopped development I don’t think that the product being commercial or open source has anything to do with it. If people stop using an open source product development stops on that open source product. There are literally 1000s of dead open source products where development has stopped because nobody used them.
As to the licensing, that’s a personal choice. The pricing on EE has worked well for most people. Its an unfortunate truth that not everyone can afford it and if there are options that let more people into EE and still allow us to care for our families, we’ll certainly explore them.
EE is amazingly affordable compared to the competition and our customers understand that by paying for a commercial product they get commercial-grade support, something that you do not get when you use Word Press.
Do you know what it costs to get high-end commercial support from Word Press? $5000. Per year. Compare that with our $249 price tag, its a super bargain. So a business that chooses to go with a “free” solution is paying a cost of some sort. They are paying the man hours to figure out a problem on their own, they are going to pay to have a 3rd party do it, or they are going to pay big to have the WP do it. For some people that is worth the trade off, for others not. EE is not always the right choice for a project and sometimes its the best choice.
I should clarify. I did not mean to suggest you at pmachine were calling me a loser. I just used that term to illustrate how I felt the other people were attacking me. That was clearly the implications of their comments, that anyone with a real business should be able to shell out $250. All I was saying is that some people would choose not to if they were on a budget and could get a free alternative product. All the subsequent comments I made were in response to these other people attacking my comments. I have to defend myself and clarify my position. They were the folks that got off topic, not me. I guess what keeps getting lost, which I will say again, is that I love you guys at pmachine. I have a hosting account there still, even though I am not currently using the pmachine software. You make great products and provide great customer service. My comments were designed to illuminate discussion on an interesting topic to me and apparently those that started the thread. I hope this conversation does spark the genesis of a pay as you go solution like a typepad for people that want that or need that. I think it would work well and be something that boosts revenue.
thanks for responding back. I was feeling bad and hoped I didn’t offend you. You’ve been a part of the pMachine Community longer than I have (by a few short months) and your feedback is much appreciated.
I have a couple more things to add, but I will do privately. Please check the email associated with your pMachine.com account. Thanks!
ps - as to Sigork and Ingmar…. well, they are Sigork and Ingmar. May I humbly suggest that you have defended your position well and move on
Wow, I ignore work for the weekend and look at what happens. First, I love you all. Well, except for Ingmar, sources on the pMachine Playground inform me he has cooties. Second, if anyone is a loser, it is me as I forgot to walk the dog this morning. Back to the topic though…
Yes, we stopped development of a product. The fact that we took so many steps to make it less painful, I hope is telling. We did not abandon it. Even after the sales of pMachine Pro dropped nearly into oblivion we still released an entirely brand new version that had new security features and made it compatible for years to come. That was done with the sole intention of letting those people unable or unwilling to switch to EE to continue using the product for many more years. We keep the forums open so whatever pMachine Pro users exist they can still work together. And for people actually able/willing to move to EE we made the upgrade path really cheap and wrote an import utility for all of the data. Open sourcing it was not an option due to a lack of interest and trust but also some legal reasons. ::shrug:: The natural way of things had a younger, fitter rival pushing pMachine Pro out of its position, and if that is a point against using a closed OR open source solution, in which this could happen in either, than so be it.
The licensing discussions seem unproductive. Nearly everyone has an opinion and typically such opinions only raise adrenaline and not the discourse. Nothing is the perfect solution for everyone and like all things we aimed for balance.
Update: Oh, and the Typepad-esque service is a complicated idea all said, but we have discussed it and it might one day happen. A great deal of EE’s power lies in how you can configure its innards, which is a bit lost on a hosted solution where allowing people to upload their own plugins, modules, extensions and writing PHP scripts in templates would be rather dangerous. So, there is a balance required, which while may seem nice for those users requesting it would be a complete headache for us.
I just wish to make it clear at this point, that despite being “Ingmar”, as it were, my opinion was not meant as an attack on Doug, and should not be construed as one. Contrary to what he appears to believe, my comments were certainly not meant to imply that he is a “loser” (his term), or “that anyone with a real business should be able to shell out $250.” Basically, what I was saying is that different people have different needs, and EE serves mine. Obviously Doug’s needs are slightly different, and that’s fine, too.
By the way, may I, in turn, humbly suggest we finally close this thread? As far as I am concerned all is said and done.
I’m not sure where you got that from. In fact, some of the things you bring up, like a pay-as-you go service are very interesting and have started some internal chatter here. 
