Being a programmer (and a web-developer) I know how hard it is to develop some scripting language based tool from scratch. No exception in case of Mozilla Add-on developers also! We do need to spend hundreds of hours to make some really good Add-on!
So Mozilla in return is giving the developers an opportunity to earn some bucks out of their add-ons. The earning will completely depend on the user’s donation. Not only that, now developers can also put their suggested donation price on the Contribution button. (Just as shown on the image above)… This is obviously a new addition to the new Mozilla Add-on page…
Impact on Developers & Mozilla:
- The new Contribute cum donation button is surely going to motivate developers to make more useful add-ons. As now there is a direct way for donation, rather than asking for a donation through the developer’s blog!
- For now Mozilla is paying all the amount of the contribution minus PayPal’s transaction fees. But in near Future we may see Mozilla taking a small cut for its benefit!
- It is true that much of the Mozilla Add-ons are developed by limited number of developers. So if this feature become a success then we shall be seeing more developers around the Mozilla Community
- Moreover, this will obviously encourage developers to host their add-ons with Mozilla, being there an easier way to get paid
All the donation are done by PayPal. Users can obviously select their own amount of donation instead of the recommended amount!
Impact on users and their Feedback:
Now this is the most interesting part of all! Are you going to donate? Obviously Mozilla has kept the contribution optional, not mandatory! So it means users can still use the Add-ons without actually donating something!
CNet news has hosted a poll on this which shows an interesting result on this!
So a majority are not willing to pay where as more than 35% is willing to pay 1$-5$! Now, we cant say that it is a bad stat regarding donation!
Personally when my earning becomes sufficient enough then I will surely donate some reasonable amount to the Developer of Firebug and some other very useful add-ons I use! Those have really made my life easier in web-development! So I know that the donation will be worthy! So what do you say??
Source: CNet News…
