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Xoops is becoming a more and more professional product. It follows that more and more people will use it in a professional way. It also means that the contributors will be more likely to be professionals who (try to) make a living from developing software.
When you contribute to an open-source project, you do that in your spare time, so you do what you like best. You work on your newest, hippest theme, or a clan-roster for your CS team. When you work on something someone else requested, you're giving up your spare time for that. In a market based economy it is common to sell one's spare time for money. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact the other attitude (Xoops and Money don't mix) scares me.
If it is possible and common to make money with Xoops, this will draw professional programmers, who will most likely make quality contributions to the project, even if the modules/themes they develop for money are closed source. (At the moment we're not really sure if our license requires all modules to be GPL'ed too, but if the module is never released to the public that is of no consequence.)
Thus we can only win by encouraging people to earn money - even make a living - from Xoops. Hey, I'm positively thrilled by the thought of professionals working full time on and with Xoops.
I also do XOOPS programming for money. It enables me to spend some of my work time on the CMS I like best. Of course I could say: "No, I use Mambo or Typo3 for work, and XOOPS only as a hobby." What would that say about my opinion of Xoops? If I thought any other project had higher quality and was more usable, I would be contributing to that project, not to Xoops. So it's only natural that I want to use XOOPS to make a living, because it is the best system.
One thing that has worked well for me (and I encourage other professionals to do the same) is that I offer my clients a discount if they are willing to release the work I do for them to the XOOPS community.
Another thing I would like to suggest: If you make money with Xoops, and you can't contribute any code to the project because of the nature of the project or the will of the client, please consider donating a little to the project. I know that using XOOPS for commercial work enables you to make much lower bids than competitors who build sites from scratch or use commercial CMSs. Whenever XOOPS makes me win a pitch or finish the job in half the time, I donate 5-10% of the fee.
Sounds fair, doesn't it?