Sustainable Funding for EasyEngine - From "side project" to Real Project

v3
#21

@all please do not forget to like my first post in this topic if you like the idea of giving EasyEngine some more support.

#23

Sorry for a delayed reply. I have a long list of ā€œdramaticā€ reasons but I have very less time so will keep my reply to the point.

Re: Donations

I am afraid to say, donations are not a sustainable model.

We already have a donation page. I am grateful to all the people who donated.

But in reality, its impossible to depend on donations. Atleast for a small project like EasyEngine.

Re: Premium stuff

We no longer offer premium support. We tried that. But once people paid some bucks, they wanted too much of time and reported many issues that are not related to EasyEngine or in some cases not at all related to the server.

We do have a plan to release a web-version someday (freemium model). But it needs a sizeable investment which we donā€™t have.

For CLI v4 release, we have some funds for development. Also, as we are developing in PHP, we can use spare dev bandwidth from rtCamp - the parent company behind EasyEngine.

Bottleneck

The main bottleneck is me! :disappointed:

It has been always the case that I do research + testing and then write articles which EE dev team followed.

The overall EasyEngine idea/design, all caching including redis-full page cache, nginx-helper plugin, and our nginx-builds are my brainchild.

I couldnā€™t give any time to do any research for LetsEncrypt in EasyEngine v3 and that feature amounts to almost 20% of issues and support requests we receive!

I donā€™t want to let it happen again, hence the project is moving slowly.

As rtCamp is growing, I am unable to give plenty of time to EasyEngine. I recently started putting questions that need research on github issue tracker. If you can contribute to research side, please do!

Alternatives & forks

I have made it clear many times that we have no problem with people forking EE or using alternatives.

EE is MIT licensed. So basically anyone can do what they want with EE!

Priority

EE is a side project to me. It may become our key product someday or die a slow death. In case of later, I will let you know when to switch!

We will keep running this site and portal, as long as we ourself use EE. The day we stop using EE, we will put a goodbye message on the main website!

Summary

  1. The best way to help the project, help us with your knowledge and expertise especially around containers. You can start getting involved with research issues.
  2. If you want to use EE, please use it. If you want to abandon EE, please do so. I am grateful in both cases for giving EE a chance.
  3. If you are very serious about EasyEngine and would like to join the project as an investor or product lead/manager, please write to me. :wink:
2 Likes
#24

For anyone following this, v4 beta1 was recently released: https://easyengine.io/blog/ee-v4-beta-1-release/

#25