Why start this service?
The simple answer:
Too many broken plugins, bad metadata, missing documentation, developer burn out, and the general downward spiral of the quality of plugins. No funding available to even try and fix it, and the desire to have a better community!
The in-depth answer:
The NativeScript community is at a cross roads, we have a lot of plugins! However, because of the multiple breaking changes over the last 4 year, we now have a huge number of broken plugins. In addition the top working plugins, seem to be being held together by only a small group of long time authors. They feel the strain of trying to maintain their plugins, OR trying to feed their families. How can we make it so that they can do both?
After understanding that the community had to solve the problem, I started researching different funding methods. Patreon, donations, TideLift, Github Sponsorship, License Zero, Dual Licensing, Code Fund, Bounty Source, Open Collective and about 30 others. Several of the programs were just dismissed as totally unworkable; I mean really how many people want to even try and setup to donate or subscribe to 10 - 40 authors?
Seeing what has worked with these programs, and mainly what has not; the basic foundation of this program was created. From the initial idea to its final design was month's of in-depth research, discussions with multiple parties (including Progress), and finally choosing what we believe is the best route forward to meet all our criterias.
Criteria:
Too many broken plugins, bad metadata, missing documentation, developer burn out, and the general downward spiral of the quality of plugins. No funding available to even try and fix it, and the desire to have a better community!
The in-depth answer:
The NativeScript community is at a cross roads, we have a lot of plugins! However, because of the multiple breaking changes over the last 4 year, we now have a huge number of broken plugins. In addition the top working plugins, seem to be being held together by only a small group of long time authors. They feel the strain of trying to maintain their plugins, OR trying to feed their families. How can we make it so that they can do both?
After understanding that the community had to solve the problem, I started researching different funding methods. Patreon, donations, TideLift, Github Sponsorship, License Zero, Dual Licensing, Code Fund, Bounty Source, Open Collective and about 30 others. Several of the programs were just dismissed as totally unworkable; I mean really how many people want to even try and setup to donate or subscribe to 10 - 40 authors?
Seeing what has worked with these programs, and mainly what has not; the basic foundation of this program was created. From the initial idea to its final design was month's of in-depth research, discussions with multiple parties (including Progress), and finally choosing what we believe is the best route forward to meet all our criterias.
Criteria:
- Feed our families, AND allow us to maintain the plugins.
- Least disruptive to the community.
- Ability to allow a simple single fee to support all the authors, maintainers and even contributors!
- Ability to fund documentation and metadata fixes
- Ability for adding additional authors.
- Ability to add new plugins, and potentially fund new plugin development.
- Ability to expand the program to easily support and test the NativeScript flavors: Vue, Angular, React, Svete, and others.
- Ability to be simple for the community to use (i.e. npm i @proplugins/plugin-name and tns plugin add @proplugins/plugin-name. )
- Ability to have a curated list of working plugins for NativeScript 6.x & 7.x
- Ability to tie it into Plugins.NativeScript.Rocks
- Ability to easily access the demos.
- Ability to easily upgrade to future Phase 2 through Phase 4 planned features. (See: FAQ)