Is it just designers borrowing ideas from each other, or is there something I've missed?
It looks like the gem, + and $ are equally spaced but visually its not balanced because the gem is so big.
The site submitted lacks any detail whatsoever; they should at least be bothered to explain their service and its uses to developers and customers alike. The web design is basically boilerplate for Ruby web services, so it doesn't add any personal touches.
By the way, the code is not obfuscated. So yes, basically, users who paid for the gems can put this in their own git repository and do "whatever" they want with it as long as they don't share it.
Does it make sense ?
Anyway, I don't have in mind to replace the ruby gems platform by something else which will be not free. really. And trust me, that won't happen because it won't work.
But, in some situations like mine with LocomotiveCMS, having a platform to sell modules (it happens that my modules are ruby gems) makes perfectly sense. And what I'm looking for here by posting this is to see if other people will be interested in as well.
Believe me, I'm not the evil, not at all
I simply pointed out that your idea contravenes the current community conventions and that you would have a hard time getting quality developers to go along with you and contribute as the vast majority derive pleasure from sharing, modifying, improving and contributing their code to many projects in the most open and free manner currently possible.
So no, I, for one, am not interested in licensing my work for you to use on your platform as experience has taught me that buying plugins for an open-source codebase is not an ideal solution for my customers, I don't believe that selling gems at $30 here and there contributes in any way, shape or form to the progress of the community and as a business model, you're offering has a very low barrier to entry, plus a bad reputation (Hotscripts?).
Yes, people do make money selling plugins. No, I do not foresee the Ruby community lining up behind that idea as many of us make our money in implementation, not selling software that we'll need to later support in a volatile environment.
So again, good luck selling your pay-for-gems model to the Ruby community.
Also, and this is just an aside, but you should really have someone proofread your work before you broadcast it out like that, and if you're going to be so defensive when people don't agree with you, maybe you should stick to an easier business.
Plain old download a gem file and unpack it in vendor in rails app would work for older projects.
There would be some challenges, how will you install via bundler?, does it need some authentication for gem download?
This MVP is maybe a bit too M.
But certainly there must be things that would only be implemented if the costs of doing so were defrayed.
But it will certainly complicate things like deployment. Will we be putting license codes into bundler eventually?
