No begging
Open Source's obsession with Donate buttons bothers me. I think it's lazy and lame to ask your customer to do your pricing work for you. Moreover, I find getting paid by guilt to be bad karma. Our core code base is free, and we mean it. Hosting & services companies rebrand concrete5 and undercut our own business every day. I have to look at that as okay, because when I said it was free, I meant it. To then turn around and start shoveling guilt about "well you really SHOULD pay what it's worth" is foolish at best. We've never stuck a Donate button on the footer of every page here. My personal feeling is if you're paying someone money for something, you should get something out of it.
Instead we've offered all sorts of other ways for us (and you!) to make money. As a hosting or services company you can join our partnership program and get all sorts of value. As a developer you can generate some recurring revenue from your work by selling it in our marketplace. Want fast & incitement support? Host with us. Last year we developed a lot of revenue options and they all work, but we've never begged.
Send us, for you
In 2009, concrete5 has grown dramatically. When we were commercial software, we had a couple dozen active clients at a time. Today there are over 25,000 concrete5 installs pinging us for updates and over 100,000 total downloads. There's more than 10,000 members in our forums stretching from our home in Portland, Oregon to as far Japan and the Sudan. We've helped our 3rd party app developers generate thousands of dollars, and we're hosting hundreds of sites on our servers.
It's all quite exciting, mostly because our competition has spent years just thinking about many of the ideas we've already implemented in such a short time. Our goal is to pass all services work to our partners, depend on 3rd party developers for add-on development, and generally keep a small team focused on making the core better and promoting the project as infrastructure for the web. We haven't reached that point yet. We're not rolling in cash here. There's no VC or deep pockets behind concrete5, just my credit cards. We're very grateful for the freedom that the hosting and marketplace revenue has given us in choosing our services work, but we're not in a position to just worry about the core code base and promoting the project, yet.
We need your donations and help.
(Please understand, however, that Concrete CMS is not a non-profit or charitable organization and any donation will not entitle you to a deduction for a charitable contribution.)