A word on donations, open source, and the Elgg community site

Recently there have been an increasing number of posts on the community site related to donations and paid support / solutions on the community site. I have made a couple posts addressing this, but it's still occurring with increasing frequency.

First, this is the community site for Elgg as an open source project. This is not your personal site; this is not an Elgg demo site; this is not an advertising service. This site is a place for users, contributors, and those curious about Elgg to interact with each other, share ideas, share troubleshooting, and to share plugins and themes. The contributions to this site are made without want, requirement, or expectation of donations. If you are uncomfortable with these stipulations, please leave the community site. If you cannot abide by these stipulations, you will be banned.

Secondly, as a developer who happens to like having food to eat, a place to sleep, and heat in the winter, I understand the need to be reimbursed for time spent developing. As an open source developer, I understand the need to keep the project's community active and I believe in the principles and philosophies of Open Source. These two concepts are not mutually exclusive, but are beginning to be in this community. When every discussion board and group is littered with donation requests it greatly distracts from the value of having a community based around a project.

On the other side of this are the users who take all for free without contributing back. This also hurts Elgg. I've outlined before how to contribute back to Elgg if you can't code, and for the most part people do. There are some "help vampires" that demand free help right now or they demand immediate updates to plugins. This isn't the way to interact in an open source community either and is just as damaging as commercial spam.

No one is against using Elgg as a means of income. In fact, part of the decision to dual license GPL/MIT on Core was because MIT offers developers who want to resell greater flexibility than the GPL. However, having the community site polluted with "Donate!" messages is distasteful and subtracts from the worth of the community as a whole. More than one person has commented on the fact that seeing all the donation requests in the community makes Elgg less appealing. This must stop.

So what would you, the community, like to see on the this site regarding commercial services and donation requests? The current plan is to allow those who wish to offer consulting services for Elgg to do so tastefully through their profile and the Professional Services group. In group discussion, if the only reason for a reply on a discussion topic is to gather donations or to offer unsolicited paid services, it will be deleted and the offending user will be banned. Posts prefixed with "Looking for a developer." are, of course, fair game to announce your services to the author. Post that say "How do you..." are not appropriate threads in which to ask for donations.

On a personal note, I hate that this post needed to be made. What has been happening on the community site is so far from the philosophies of open source that it's very discouraging. Open source software is something I feel strongly about and that I will fight for. If you don't like interacting with an open source community, please leave--you will be frustrated and you will frustrate those around you. If, however you simply don't know how to interact with us or are uncomfortable about it, please send me a direct message or an email and we'll talk. The point of open source is community, and that's something I will protect in Elgg.

Please comment at the Community Action group on the community site.