Developing Commercial Plugins

Develop Plugins Development
21

Thanks for putting effort to writing it all down. I appreciate it. And I am sure it will be helpful to others.

In terms of protecting rights for your plugin/tool it is a tricky question. It is the same as protecting rights for you peace of art (i.e. image). Let’s say you in USA and have all legal right to suit the person who abused your rights. But doing so you will loose so much money that this is even not worth it. And it is a complete story for different countries. In global aspect it is kinda tricky.

Same goes for plugins that cost $2-3 you definitely will not become filthy reach with them.

Especially once Krita team responded here I came to a conclusion that the best attitude in here is as following.
Here I made, you can buy. Sure others can take(steal? - GPL would argue about that) it. But if you buy it from me you can get support and future updates.

I think it is something similar to what is going on in the world of big guys. Tech is being stolen all the time. That is why there is exists a thing like corporate espionage. That is why for me is more important to build a brand and people know what they get.

Man, lets take Krita for instance. You sure can get it for free. Though I still bought it in Window store because I do not have to bother myself updated it manually all the time.

So for the plugins I think is the same.

In terms of profit. Yes. I do not think you can make a living with it. But what you can do for sure is to have at least some income. Combine it with other income strings and you can get around :slight_smile:

Yes. The hope is that if I sell things, it will attract people who are serious about it. And here goes a game. More serious people come - more likely Krita will be used in production. Less serious people come, I need to figure out what should I do to make them come :smiley:

Thanks I will go for it :slight_smile:

22

The GPL is the equivalent of slapping a huge “FREE” sign on your lemonade stand next to a pile of flyers containing your recipe. Some people are going to take a cup of lemonade and a flyer for free and they have the right to do so.

This is what Retopoflow does. I have a free copy so I can’t nag them at 12:30 in the night… well, I could, but I doubt they would be impressed…

23

That is true. But there a lot of plugins for Blender that are GPL. One of them has full on company with software engineers and all of that.

Yeah… And another drawback of plugins that are being given up for free. They more usually (not always) someone’s pet project. And once they done it, they leave it as it is. And when users discover some bugs or glitches they are left for themselves to fix it, or hope that maybe, someday, somehow the author will fix it.

Take MyPaint for instance. Nice tool, but core developer (who designed a thing) left the project. And now it is in well, on more static condition.

And in terms of free/paid.
I also have Aseprite (pretty cheap tool), though if you want you can go through the trouble of compiling you can get it for free - the source is open.

So my assumption that people buying not always due to access to source code but for a convenience. Again my target market professional artists. I do not think they will bother to dig through my code, they have more things to do.

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24

Just wanna add my 2 cents here, as the Krita maintainer. As long as the GPL license is adhered to I’m all for, really excited about and totally in favour of people making plugins. I’m fine with us maintaining a page with links, posting news stories about them on krita.org and amplifying any social media outreach where we can.

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25

And some won’t know that they can.

Awww, but I like running legacy programs :slight_smile:

Anyways, I’m not here to tell you what to do or not do - I just want to make sure you are aware of what the GPL allows others to do with your project - don’t want you to be in for any nasty surprises! After all, if you make free and great-tasting GPL lemonade, it benefits me. Just make sure to let us know when you mix up your cool new plug-in!

That is very nice of you Halla. Maybe we will see a Krita page listing links/downloads to top plug-ins and resources some day (and maybe a little bio about the people who make them)!

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Yes. I am. It was kinda shocking to realize that. But I passed that state :slight_smile:

Or maybe Krita might host its own platform like krita-swap :smiley: Where people can host their things and get the cut from sells :slight_smile:

And integrate it into an app… Nice. Something what Unity did with their store. Then people can distribute other things like gradients, templates, seexpr scripts and stuff. Phew :star_struck:

Would be nice too.

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27

I am worried about some other things, such as:
A developer created a paid plug-in. His “enemy” immediately posted a post on the KA forum to publish it for free
This does not seem to violate the gpl agreement, but it is very uncomfortable…

I also started to update automatically. But now I always download the latest version before the steam push :rofl:

In fact, if a software/plug-in is well-known enough, there are always many websites or accounts that can immediately update its pirated version…maybe for the number of fans, it may be advertising, or it may be sold at a price of about $0.5
So it is wise to build a brand. It can increase cohesion and identity. Everyone agrees with the work of the developers and hopes to get better.
Of course, there are also people who will never pay because of busy work and meager wages. But this is a social problem. If you cannot identify with the value of your own work, it is difficult to identify with the value of others’ work ……

Developers are not responsible for free plugins. The same is true for paid plugins (we did not sign a treaty that must fix bugs) but it would seriously overdraft the reputation. If the next one is developed, no one will buy one

ArmorPaint seems to be the same. Although this is the freedom of the development team, I am not sure if it is good for a large software. Artists don’t know how to build software, and it is difficult for them to try this software (or download from the local community, but almost nothing in non-English speaking areas). This is not conducive to spread. More people compare it with commercial software

I remember there was such a discussion. For python plug-ins, there is an audit problem (will someone make trouble and make plug-ins that are not good for the system?)

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28

I tried to keep a list here: Resources — Krita Manual 5.2.0 documentation - it’s good to know that everyone with a KDE account can suggest changes to it, which is the easier way to get the plugin listed there (you can also try to nag people for them to make the so called Merge Request, but depending on various life circumstances, the success might vary). Maybe @halla or @scottyp could make a link to this page directly from krita.org? That way it would be more visible.

Oh and now I think, maybe someone should add information how to get your resources to the page, linked at the top of the top of the page, so a visitor would know.

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29

Doing a MR is too complicated…

I might be the dumbest developer ever to be able to code things without being able to understand how to work with git & gitlab, but MR clearly is not the best solution to expect collaborative work for on online documentation… A wiki page for documentation might be a better choice, especially for people not comfortable with technical stuff.

Grum999

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30

We had wiki pages - in fact, they still exist somewhere… but then Krita moved to sphinx for, I think, better/easier translations? Or management? It was still ok as long as there was Phabricator, but now that we (i.e. KDE) moved to gitlab, everything is 3x more complicated in that area :frowning: I tried to make an easy guide but even an easy guide has like a thousand of steps, which you need to do exactly right or everything will end up messed up.

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I agree I am still locked out to add things to the resources page.

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Why not just have additional resource to documentation?
OGRE for instance has its documentation as part of a repo (same way Krita has) and user forum with a lot of goodies about render and tutorials.

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Imagine if Wikipedia was based on Sphinx+Gitlab… you can be sure that practically nobody will participate to write/update pages…

I know Sphinx, I already used it and it was a pleasure to be able to generate clear documentation directly from code
I can understand that for KDE users used to work with these tools it could be easy
I can understand choice for KDE community to have centralized and reduced number of tools

Concerning git, I’m just able to push to my github repo, work with one branch, but even with this I’m sometimes lost and I don’t even talk how I manage the merge when it start to have divergence and conflicts… :sweat_smile:

But I’m diverging about original post subject :crazy_face:

Grum999

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34

Thanks - the UI plug-ins there look nice. I’m always having problems with my UI being way too big.

Sounds good. I don’t know who manages Krita’s e-mail, but if adding a resource is as difficult as it sounds from the discussion in this thread, you could always add a special e-mail just for such requests (finished contributions to Krita as resources/plug-ins) with a note that said e-mail is only checked every week/month (so it might not be the quickest way to update the list, but it would only require an e-mail - no signing up for accounts, etc…) .

I’m sure there are people who would like it - however, I run Krita on a strictly off-line computer, so I would not be able to use it. Actually, I don’t even use those on my internet connected devices, either XD . So I’m very happy Krita is available as an Appimage :smiley:

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Oh dear. That’s the sort of the thing I was thinking of when I mentioned some one getting a hair across their butt…

36

That is why I was talking about brand. Even though people might steal the thing, people will know who is the original author.

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While it might not violate GPL, that doesn’t exactly mean they can just post it on KA. KA can enforce their own rules independent of the GPL. As long as KA mods don’t agree to such behavior, they can van the practice and warn those offending. So it is up to KA’s policy. That said, this community seems to overall be pretty friendly so the chance of that happening is slim.

Of course people would still be able to distribute outside of KA as per GPL.

There is also the option of self auditing. Just like in some sense this forum lets regular users do basic modding. The same can apply where trusted users who can code can vote to mark plugins as acceptable or hostile.

And some basic tooling to outline dependency and usage to make the process easier. Red flags are things like accessing the file system, piping and etc. (To speed up the audit process)

Like all things new, it takes time to get used to it. I also pretty much only used git for simple uploads and when I had to do MRs, I made quite a few boo boos (especially when dealing with going back and splitting commits), so you aren’t alone here.

And I do agree on the difficulty of the documentation stuff.

Well for things like keeping a list of plugins, doesn’t Discourse also have a wiki feature? So KA can add their own wiki for that.

Overall though, I will say that probably the difficulty of accessing the documentation does hinder stuff to some extent. I personally wanted to redo the ffmpeg documentation but setting up sphynx and all the other stuff is making me more lazy. Not that I can’t figure out how to do it, simply coding stuff here and there is more fun the documenting things… so it gets being put off. The barrier to entry matters quite a bit. The easier things are, the more people will participate.

I understand that for things like coding, there is no way around going through MRs. But for documentation where nothing needs to be compiled, it should be easier. Git is a standard, is there no web based software that can replace sphynx and then once done can automate the MR releases via API? A lot more people can contribute to documentation then those that can program.

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38

This should be included in the discussion as early as possible. Otherwise when it happens, there will be plenty of reasons to weasel out of it. And people won’t be happy.

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39

my 2 cents …
gpl has actually slowed down blenders adoption … companies like alegorythmik had to pull out 2 legs to get a plugin wrapper working … now that we have it its still 10 times slower and has less features than 3ds max or maya substance plugin… that goes for any of the c++ plugins wrapped in python for the very reason , and also the reason well probably never see native dll plugins for blender.

that said , blender has many great addons/scripts. but its also the only software where i have seen scripters try to wrench money even out of the most basic and simple script … 3ds max scripters wouldnt even dare to ask money for their 50 lines script , just like browser extension devs …

blender is pretty much the only platform where every noob tries to sell his 10 lines scripts for a dollar or 50 cents lol, i feel shame when i see that :see_no_evil: :see_no_evil:

that said , blender is a versatile software which benefits a lot from numbers of addons, krita on the other hand has one thing it does and only needs a stable core with all the important functions and an easy to use ui…in a few years when krita has every cool option already build in, theres little reason for additional scripts anymore , just exporters or bridges might be scripted then

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