This kinda plays into a post I just made (Mewtieful!).
There's lots of us that attend say Sharemafia with very diverse capabilities. We all would like to find a way to really make some dough on the InterNut, preferably as much as we can muster.
But collaboratively we all run into the same things, who can one really trust? How can a mechanism be created by which all involved can benefit, the work gets done, we all get some really nice incomes and purchase an island all living happily ever after?
Its always been one of those, "Man o' man" type things I have noted in my travels.
There is SO MUCH TALENT out there as individuals all trying to make a better life for themselves, families, cats and puppies. There are artists that ASTONISH me creating stuff that given the right application of it, $$$$. There are many talented programmers, marketers, ideas people, content creators on and on... But everyones off doing this or that and never doing anything in a collaborative environement and thats REALLY where success resides for all.
Take Joomla (please!) LOL.
Its at best a average piece of work, what makes it nice are all those add-on's created by other folks... While they dont necessarily collaborate on the individual items what are the results? The results are that the Joomla core people win. So they could be construed as the beneficiaries of others collaborative work on Joomla and I suppose even in some small respect one another. Aka: Sita "AAA" rocks because the Forum component, along with the weather module, along with this and that really make for a nice site.
Nulled stuff works nice for website webmasters because if you really needed buy everything needed to really make a "commercially effective" site for a client you'd make little. So a $2000 website where you spend $600 on the stuff to make it leaves $1400. When you look at the say 100 hours to create it, $14 an hour. This all blows snail snot.
The folks at Adobee's, Microstiff (vs soft
) and others realize all this. They use "community" like a shirt. Use our stuff, tell us things, we make it better, then we'll hit you up again as well as a few million others. They create a closed loop.
Places like Sony, Microsoft etc. for example love nothing better than console gamers and PC gamers beating on one another. It fosters market. When in reality, convergence would be "logical" from a consumer standpoint, from a $$$ standpoint the longer convergence is stemmed off the better for revenue prospects.
To me... the collaborative models out there that are effective seldom are of benefit to all principles. Like the Joomla scene. Cottage developers trying to make a living so they charge $149 for say a blog component which is far less complex than a Q-Bert game thats 10 years old. They try base price on "I need make a living" in a market thats both vertical and controlled and not even fair per se.
To me... a development "Co-Op" is smarter. So... Your making this, I'm making that, she's making this and he's making templates and Bob's making this. So there are all these items and they should be sold co-operatively TOGETHER and everyone gets some dough. Continually working towards "Better". Other developers, same deal... so here's one group of 5 or 10, and here's another, and another, and another....
The net effect is a co-operative growth environment and indeed shifting control towards those who make things happen.
Its this sort of environment that the Joomla crew does its best to make sure doesnt happen because, that removes their capability to direct direction. Control.
Others going spinning off into other voids that are often chaos, Drupal for example.
We all tend to have ideas on how we can make good money on the Net but never have the "hands" all on deck to be able to do so. Some of those ideas are just not good, many are and we hope in time they "come to us" yet never seem to materialize.
There REALLY should be a way to make it materialize.
