Too many open source developers abandon their projects because they can’t sustain their work. Funding the development, maintenance, and support of an open source project can be challenging. Let’s find out together how this can work for tiptap.
There is a significant advantage to make such thoughts for tiptap. This advantage is you. With so many people using, talking about, and contributing to tiptap, we felt the tailwind to start the development of tiptap 2 confidently.
Now that we are knee-deep in the development, we don’t want this journey to end with the release of tiptap 2. There are too many plans and ideas for making it even better for you and everybody. We need to find a way to sustain our work on it.
And we are in this together, aren’t we? You want to work with an always up to date package, and you want to have reliable support if something is not working out, and you want the coolest newest features. That’s why we ask you to contribute to the thinking behind the project and why we make everything around it as transparent as our codebase already is.
The rough idea
After evaluating a few different ways to monetize an open source project and having strong opinions against a few of them, we focused on one idea. Internally, we refer to it as tiptap pro. Nothing is defined here, not even the name, or if it needs a name at all. However, there is a rough idea of it. First of all, let us be clear with that:
The whole codebase is going to stay open and accessible for everyone. No matter where you come from or what you plan to do, you should be able to start your project with tiptap.
On top of that, we plan to provide professional users (developers and companies who make money with tiptap) with additional, valuable benefits. Those benefits, and only those, will require your sponsorship.
#1 Closed community
There is still much work to be done to show what we’ve got to you. Nevertheless, we are very proud of the parts we’ve tackled already and invited very few people to chat with us in private ways, which is fantastic for our current development phase.
The precise and constructive feedback from the teams, familiar with the current version of tipap, guides our work. That’s valuable for us and everyone who is waiting for the new version.
That said, nothing we do should be private. We want everything to be open, transparent, and accessible, and a closed community won’t. While we think it could give a great benefit for a few users, we don’t believe the community would benefit from it equally and abandoned the idea.
#2 Labeled issues and contributions
From now on, all issues and pull requests created by sponsors of our organization will automatically get a sponsor 💖 label attached. It’s just a tiny change but helps us make extra sure to jump in those contributions as soon as possible and support the people who support us.
That said, we hope to get funding for the development to a level that makes it possible to put enough time into the project, to help everyone quickly, professionally, and equally. That’s what we aim for.
#3 Professional extensions
The power of tiptap is its extensibility, and with tiptap 2 we will double down on that. The new version will start with fewer extensions, but we plan to add many more extensions.
A few of those extensions are complicated to build, have complex requirements, will probably need more maintenance and support, and are likely to be used in a professional context.
With tiptap pro, we’d like to ask people who use those extensions in a commercial product to sponsor the further development, maintenance, and support of those extensions.
But we won’t ask people using it for personal projects, university projects, open source projects, or other non-profit projects to sponsor us.
Does that sound right to you?
We’re excited to hear your thoughts on this. We want to take this journey with all of you! Reach out to us on Twitter, on GitHub, on HackerNews or send an email to me!
