Some horrifying experience to which I have been subjected over the last year, drove me into writing this article to whom it may concern. The whole TYPO3 project consists of thousands of hours of volunteer time which was contributed by hundreds of people around the world.
TYPO3 itself is free. Thousands of extensions available in TER which cover almost all requirements of a modern website, are also free. Leading TYPO3 agencies like Snowflake in Switzerland, are spending a huge amount of money and ressources to develop sophisticated applications like todoyu, a project and task manager, just to give it away for free.
But what is the motivation for this? My simple answer: Because it builds up reputation as a leading supplier and it builds up a web of trust. It's that simple.
Back in 2005 I have also made a small contribution and I was simply lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time and ended up with with a domain which Google gave a page rank of 7. But I was by no means as successful in choosing my business partners. I always wanted to be programmer only, while others should take care of the money. I was wrong and it was a hard lesson to learn over the past three years here in Thailand.
However, some other people tend to think it is enough to put together some pieces of code which are all free, add some basic knowledge, give it a good shaking and then sell it to people who know even less. Well, in my humble opinion this could not be more wrong.
In the last year, I became independent of any partners and it is about time to to let lawyers and competent courts speak. Unfortunately, this becomes increasingly necessary, nowadays.
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