I think the Mautic community has been growing really nicely last couple of years, and I’m really happy to see the huge amount of contributions that get added to the core and the variety of plugins available today for money or for free.
As from time to time I help users here in the forum or as per direct contact to manage their Mautics, optimize cronjobs, fix issues I often see installations done by others.
Often I see Mautics that include plugins and enhancements not available for everyone.
Important enhancements.
I’m always wondering why someone would not feed back the enhancements of an open source software to the community?
You rely on the thousands of hours others put into Mautic.
And you keep your 20-30-50 hours of own work for yourself.
Do you think you have a market advantage?
Is it that you are embarrassed by your code?
You don’t want to take the responsibility to maintain your plugin?
Do you realize this is gonna bite you in the ass every time you upgrade your system?
Do you feel like you “already do enough” and “don’t want to work for free” for the community?
I mean I could think of a couple of reasons actually. Its not always the case, obviously there are times when you can share and give back.
First is that you simply cannot share due to the nature of business relationship that you have with your client, meaning client has to comply with this and this policy and since you are working with him/her you are required to follow that policy as well.
Second is that the code simply contains too specific logic and you would have to adapt the plugin before publishing it to community (now this is not impossible but it requires time and the more complex the plugin, more time is required - and that time is a luxury many companies do not have).
About market advantage… this argument has been used on me a couple of times - I do not agree with this, but its just what I have been told.
About this coming back to bite companies… the thing is, and this is just my view: Well its your job, if you decided to keep the project private, that is just the burden that you have to carry. And if you manage to sell that to the client that you have that is not such a bad thing.
Honestly many times and pretty sure you will agree with on this one, even if something is open sourced 9 times out of ten you have to take the initiative to move things forward.
Of course everything I wrote is not always the case and in fact most of the time its just that people do not think about the community and that is why I think the post that you made is a great reminder to everyone to think about the open source too and give back (by the way, Friendly is a great example of such company).
Its also vital that community stays alive in order to push the software forward.
I would just add that, if you like have a company, that builds its services around Mautic, I really do not think its hard to give back to community be it in money or make employees work on public Mautic issues for some time each week. Again many companies do that, and I appreciate it, there are many that do not.
If I think of something else I will add it. Just putting this here for discussion.