Hi all,

Is there any sections to add skills on some areas (enterprise integration, communication, etc.) and sevices (hosting, consulting, etc) of course involving Liferay platform?

Thank you in advance!
Ivano C.

Hey Ivano,

In the marketplace, each company that offers Marketplace apps will also have a "Company Profile" page where these things can be mentioned. Initially, we will not be offering skills (such as consulting contracts of training offers) to be bought and sold through the Marketplace.

Hi James !

Thank you for your clarification and also for your last post on the Blog about the release date of the Marketplace...

There is one more area that I need to explore...

Of course there are various level of portlet's development... One can develop a little (in terms of functionalities) portlet app addressed to the mass market at a cheap cost and another developer can build a large enterprise application (under the form of one or more set of Liferay's plugins) addressed to companies and maibe at high cost and/or complex formula to obtain the final cost, based on many and complex elements.

In the second case, it is also not easy and probably not possible at all to download and use the portlet application as is from the Marketplace... maibe the end user needs help and support to integrate the portlet application with his enterprise back end...

At the same time the use of the Marketplace to sell also large applications for the Liferay platform is still a desiderable fact for all developers ...

Have you considered this kind of case? Do you think this kind of case is possible using the Marketplace as selling channel ?

Thank you for comments!

Sincerely,
Ivano C.

I believe the model is supposed to be the same as, say, the apple or android app stores. Even the most complicated app should be configurable/usable just via a download...

Ummm... sure I'm missing something ...

Apple or Android apps are tipically client side little applications, generally (of course) for the use of a single-user ... Liferay's plugins cover a wide range of use cases and (of course) multi-users usage ... Every application is a WAR containing from one to 10, 100, 1.000 or so portllets each implementing from micro-functionality client apps to large enterprise applications with many implications when you have to integrate your Liferay "app" in an enterprise IT environment...

I'm not so sure that Liferay is just replicating an Apple or Android store ... almost I hope no!!!

Ivano C.

I think you're missing something.

The current market place is to allow Liferay admin (not end users) to just click on the desired app from his/her Liferay server to have it deployed. It's not a listing of available plugins nor services.

If you want your company to be listed, there are other options:
1. Become Liferay's partner and have the company name and description listed in partner link
2. Create a wiki page for software and service listing which anybody can add and edit.
3. Offer community version of the software from Liferay's community plugin page with information on availability of commercial version.

James !!! I think that we need some comments from you !!! :-)

Thank you in advance !

Ivano C.

All of this is just my own opinion, but...

I'm sure that the larger scale guys will have some coverage, but I think you have to look at the standard Liferay apps as examples...

You can look at the really simple ones like the calculator, dictionary, etc. Even though they're deployed at a portal level, they are still single-user applications. If you develop a scientific graphing calculator portlet, for example, this might be something you could make some dough on.

Now look at a medium-sized example. You develop a better set of Wiki portlets that have a better editing interface, full workflow management, etc. It is beyond the single-user instance, yet at the same time much of the interaction is still at the user level. Your portlets come with their own service builder based data access, and they're all bundled into a single war file. It fits nicely into the marketplace and is still something the Liferay admins could purchase and drop on their portal. Some configuration on their end and you're good to go.

How about some non-portlet based examples? Create a hook that either overrides or supplements standard Liferay functionality in a way that lots of people are looking for, and that can go.

But obviously there will be a line in the sand where something probably won't fit well in the marketplace. If someone has to hire you as a consultant to get your whiz-bang enterprise application from the marketplace just to get it up and running, then maybe the marketplace isn't such a great fit...

Yep, I think David said it nicely, though there will be an option to be able to sell licenses and possibly support for your app. In the Beta release, one will be able to purchase differing levels of licenses (e.g. a 100-user license or a 2-server license, and for either of those, they can be subscription, where you pay every year, or perpetual, where you pay once.) We are also looking into being able to offer different support levels, so you could could package licenses with support. Finally, for companies buying non-trivial apps for use by employees, they will be able to purchase licenses for apps and give rights to those licenses out to their employees. Sort of a "pre-paid plan" for corporate apps.

For larger or more complex deployments, it boils down to an issue of packaging - if your app spans across multiple tiers and differing software platforms/systems, you would need to package it to be able to be easily applied to the different tiers (e.g. portlets for Liferay, some other plugin type for other integrated services, crypto keys for your hardware accelerator, etc). Liferay will be able to manage the lifecycle for the overall app (and the parts that apply to Liferay), but the other non-Liferay components (if any) would have to do it themselves.

Thank you all!

After the clarification from James, I think the focus have to be the agreement between the developers and Liferay with the rules to apply to the revenues from the products sold via the Marketplace.

Moreover, It is mandatory that the developers apply the license models imposed by the Marketplace so the next question is: can we obtain a draft copy of the license models provided by the Marketplace and of the agreement between developers and Liferay?

The legal part of the Marketplace is important like the technical part, so a beta version of the agreements is important too! :-)

Thank you in advance,
Ivano C.

We've not finalized the legal docs yet, but once we do I will certainly share them. There will be a Marketplace Developer's Agreement that one will have to digitally sign before one can upload apps to the Marketplace. As for license models, there will be per-server and per-user models, along with the option for perpetual and subscription. The Beta release in April will not have the ability to charge for apps (this is the last and most difficult piece), but will be added during the Beta testing period. And it's not technically difficult, it's more of a business problem!

Hi James, thank you for your feedback...

You told that the Beta release in April will not have the ability to charge for apps..

I agree with you that charge for the apps is a business problem... and I'll add that it is a big business problem... In fact you have to implement in the Marketplace application methods to interpreter financial and and tax applied in all over the world... Then you have to take care of import money from the end user and export money to the developers...

For example, you get money from an Indian end user that purchased the app from the marketplace.. In what valuta you get the money ? For example from native valuta you have to change the amount in USD... Then you have to exchange the money (after you deduct your revenue) in another valuta, maibe EURO because the developer is from France ...

This is a very complex business, many laws involved, many agreements that have to give respect, many and different fiscal laws of all over the world ....
Is Liferay implementing all the above processes?

And, what about the respect of the license between the developer and the end user?
What are the Liferay responsability if a end user download the app and then don't pay the license ?
Do you are thinking to some software protection key to put inside the code, when the use of the app is not free or open sourced ?

Thank you for comments!

Ivano C.

I'm also interested in how users will be able to get a refund and on responsibilities of parties involved.
I'm especially concerned because not all the software work as expected and some portlet may cause havoc to a system.

Since Liferay is based in California, would CA laws be applied to transactions made in the Marketplace?

I think Liferay is just providing a space where sellers and buyers can interact. I think the complication comes when the transaction becomes
company to company instead of company to user.

Yep, these are all difficult questions to answer, which is why you won't have e-commerce in April But rest assured we are taking the time to do it right. I'm not a tax attorney or certified public accountant so I'm not really qualified to answer these questions, but they will get answered as we get further along in the implementation.

I think there was a clause in California law about refund. When money get involved, distribution tends to get messy with all these legal issues.
This is especially true with human services because time already put in can't be returned and somebody has to take a loss. :-)

(I don't do windows, but I do contracts. )

Well I'd have to believe if Apple and Amazon can solve these issues, that Liferay should be able to also...

I think that's why they stick with low priced "packaged" products which have low possibility of during any damages and not high priced human services which has a very high degree of variance.

Well, I guess I see the marketplace as a "for-pay" option to the free plugins that are available now. For the most part they are pretty self-contained (at least the ones I've looked at) and don't really interfere w/ the standard Liferay container. So if someone has taken the time to develop a plugin that is as self-contained, and submitted it to Liferay, and they've 'blessed' it by saying it works in a clean environment, then I think it's almost on-par w/ the Apple App Store.

I'm not sure I'd be in the market for a plugin that may have disaster written all over it, or one that had dependencies on other plugins or 3rd party packages I wasn't familiar with, but that's just me...

That's the thing with Ivano't comment:



I think he's referring to portlets are are highly dependent on other portlets. Having a portlet that leaves database footprints are not too good.

We do not intend to allow people to offer services (like the ability to buy X number of hours of consulting) through the Marketplace. What we do want to do though, is have an "ideas" board where people can submit ideas for apps they'd like to see on the Marketplace, and can be voted up/down, so when a developer is looking for ways to make money on the marketplace, they can look at the board, implement the top idea, and rake in the cash

That'll be very interesting.

Simply agree with the idea to have all of them included in marketplace, as they are all market related...

Good day! I do agree about what you had posted because as a certain developer must have different type of strategies and techniques for able to earn more profit or income. What a very nice and interesting topic.