If you have just come along you will probably not notice anything really, but if you have come back after a few weeks, or months, you will notice there is something different about jWarlock. And I am not talking about the cool little wizard dude at the top of the page either.

For quite a while now I have been developing for Joomla, providing support and not asking for much more than a donation to show your enthusiasm for a product. However, there is also a rule of economics (i think) that says nothing can be free forever.

What does this have to do with GPL software?

Not many people realise that GPL does not mean monetarily free software and support to go with it. If I were comfortable being a starving artist I would gladly sit down and write code and make money off advertisment impressions and donations. However, in the last year that jWarlock has been in existence I have had a total of two donations (and those two people will be notified and thanked and rewarded for their kindness and initiative).

So to make jWarlock financially viable I have restructured the project to offer premium support to those you have paid for a subscription to jWarlock. These priority support tickets will be addressed before the others, and will also have a more personal response to them. An added benefit of the subscription model is I will be able to put more time and effort into these developments rather than just putting in time when I have a little bit spare.

So why does it have to be a subscription model?

To be honest it is the best way I know of to give back quality support to the people who are nice enough to support the development. It also means I can spend more time and money on the infrastructure running the project, as well as taking more time off work to get the development done.

In the end it comes down to supporting those who are making it easier and more fun for you to build and run your Joomla site. It might seem like small change to donate / subscribe for a piece of GPL software, but that small change is a token of your gratitude to the developer for the work they are putting into their projects.

So what is being changed to facilitate this new support / subscription model?

First, everything you have been able to download on jWarlock will continue to be available without registration. If however you require some support you will need to subscribe (however we are still putting together the system to handle this, so the subscription packages are not available yet).

When a support request is sent either via our contact form (coming soon too) or by email it will be placed into our Ticketing Queue. That ticket (depending on the subscription status of the email sender) will either be escalated to High Priority or be put into the first come first served queue.

I am implementing several systems to reduce the clutter in the comments on each page, and it may result in the cleaning up of a few things in the design and changing a few things around.

But for the moment, what is changing is the way I handle support requests, and who gets the attention first.

That is well and truly enough for me for tonight. If you have any queries or concerns, please feel free to shoot me an email or by all means utilise the Facebook Commenting below, I get the notification of your comment either way.

 

Regards,

 

Adam

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