At DrupalCon Portland 2022 people were talking about makers and takers. The fear was that companies that just take and use free software would outcompete companies that help to make it.
Jacob Rockowitz was complaining that the burden of maintaining the Webform module was too much for him to do in his free time. If users didn’t start paying for his work, he would have to stop doing it. He was pretty sure that users were gaining way more from Webform than it was costing him to work on it.
I suggested that Jacob could support his Webform work by using it to build his own version of SurveyMonkey. Jacob dismissed the idea. He didn’t want to add running a business to his workload. But I started thinking we could add a launch button to project pages that would spin up a trial site like Simplytest.me, with the option to make it a live site by subscribing to hosting. This business model would give project maintainers recurring revenue so they could spend more time working on their projects. All the maintainers would have to do is describe the services they provide to subscribers and specify where to deposit funds.
I went into the expo hall and started asking vendors if they could support launch buttons that would enable project maintainers to sell hosting subscriptions. Several were interested. Salim Lakhani from DevPanel went into action immediately. He had a plan for how launch buttons would work and for how to process payments to project maintainers.
Our plan for the proof of concept was to create a Drupal distribution for each launch button. Creating a distribution just to support a project maintainer turned out to be a big job. Also there was the question of which project a distribution should support when it included more than one project. A launch button wouldn’t help users with existing sites support project maintainers.
I didn’t end up creating a distribution because I wasn’t actively maintaining any projects. The practical problems of launch buttons were left to be addressed at a later time.