Media A-Team are in a very difficult position. As a commercial organisation they need to cover the costs of supporting Fabrik - which include all the effort required simply to keep pace with changes in Joomla which are huge.
Obviously they have their own Fabrik projects which can contribute to paying for this support, and consultancy fees can also help a lot.
However, as far as I can see, these still do not cover the costs of simply maintaining Fabrik's compatibility with the ever-mutating Joomla, much less cover the costs of providing free support. Media A-Team have withdrawn the previous subscription model - presumably because the costs of providing the subscription-based support were actually greater than the revenue they brought in.
I fully agree with
@pastvne that commercial projects should try to use Media A-Team's consultancy / development services as much as possible in order to help pay for the ongoing maintenance. If you have a commercial project, my advice would be to consider using their consultancy to:
- Confirm the viability of Fabrik to provide the solution you are seeking - after all would you really want to invest in developing a solution with Fabrik only to find a show-stopper after a ot of development had been completed; and / or
- Produce a high-level design / UI-design / database-design - in order that your own development is the right direction and avoids development by trial and error; and / or
- Even developing your code for you.
However, whilst bearing in mind the open-source nature of Fabrik which enables anyone to use it for free, I would go further than
@pastvne and say that:
- To encourage commercial projects to recognise the benefits they are getting from the free use of Fabrik, Media A-Team should think about providing a Commercial-Project donation capability, and ask that all commercial projects should voluntarily donate (say) 5% of their development staff costs (or in the case of development by individuals in their own time, (say) 5% of the expected first year revenue) to Media A-team as a reflection of the benefit they are getting from Fabrik and in order to contribute to the costs of maintenance.
Note: My intention here is for commercial projects simply to recognise the benefits they are receiving from use of Fabrik - and to recognise that if they invest in a commercial development using Fabrik it is essential that Fabrik is maintained for the lifetime of this system. This is NOT intended to be a form of support subscription.
- As an alternative to the above donation, and again to encourage commercial projects to recognise the benefits they are getting from the free use of Fabrik, commercial projects (or indeed all projects) could consider donating 5% of their development time to delivering contributions to the Fabrik infrastructure - support for other users, improving the Wiki, developing training materials (written or videos), development of automated unit test suite, development of a comprehensive test site, code improvements, providing support to (less skilled?) non-commercial users etc.
- To provide on-going production support for mission critical commercial projects, Media A-Team should consider providing a Production Run-Time subscription service to provide rapid support for a system which has broken (as a result of a Fabrik or Joomla change).
- To help focus the valuable Media A-Team resources (i.e. Hugh) onto critical maintenance and paid support, free support should not be provided by Media A-Team, but instead the community of Fabrik developers should be encouraged to provide support for other community users.
- To enable the above Media A-Team should provide the support necessary - for example: a comprehensive wish list of stuff that the community can work on, a test instance of Fabrik that can be used to develop a comprehensive test site, the basic infrastructure to support automated unit testing, etc.
- Media A-Team should provide a means to measure and recognise contributions made by users (e.g. providing community support to others, Wiki improvements, training materials, code improvements, project donations etc.).
The purpose of this measurement would be four-fold:
1. Public recognition - which is a pretty strong driver for many open-source communities.
2. So that the community users can prioritise support they provide to other community users to reward those who contribute over those who leech.
3. If resources are available after other priorities are met (i.e. maintenance, paid work, reviewing, commenting and merging community PRs) then perhaps the measured level of contributions made by users could be used as a means of allocating Media A-Team this time - i.e. the more you contribute, the more able you are to ask for support from Hugh when you do need it.
Note: It seems to me to be likely that those who contribute will be more knowledgeable and will likely require less support - and that if regular contributors ask for and receive support (presumably for something not currently documented), they would then be likely to feedback what they learnt into e.g. Wiki improvements which might avoid the same question being asked again.
4. Hopefully the above would provide a positive-feedback cycle which will accelerate the growth of this approach.
If you look back through my previous forum posts, you will find that when I have asked community members if they would be willing to contribute, the response has generally been
VERY positive. IMO this is a door waiting to be pushed open.