Actually, Volumio is what it has always been: an open-source project, backed by a company, which needs funding to operate and improve.
In the beginning, our source of income was just the OEM (providing Volumio technology to manufacturers), but this ended up in us developing only what was prioritized by such companies. With MyVolumio we achieved the ability to develop features asked by the community, since the revenues helped do the required investments.
I am not sure what you mean by “commercial”, but it’s good to clarify what we are planning and what is the rationale behind it.
The plugin store as we have designed it will allow any developer to publish their plugins either free (as it is now) or paid. The infrastructure is already there (with this new iteration) and once Volumio3 is up and running we will do the remaining part (UI and payment provider).
The idea behind it is that this way, if someone wishes to sell their plugins, they can do so, and hopefully get something back from it. Or, attract other services providers to publish “top-notch” stuff into Volumio.
We are also considering to publish eventually some of our plugins outside of the subscription plan (we get this request a lot from the community) but as of now, there is not a plan to do so.
That would go against our principles, and frankly be also quite counterproductive.
I’ve already stated elsewhere (in a couple of discussions) that we (as Volumio) are not against “competitor plugins” and that they will be accepted if they respect the same guidelines as all other plugins have to respect (first of which: do not conflict with the good working of Volumio core).
And that’s not just wishful thinking: we already do that. There is a third-party CD plugin (paid one) that is currently accepted into Volumio2. So, if we would have wanted to “boycott competitors” we would already have done it.
The example of CD Plugin is actually something that made us see the potential of this system. We offer a simple way for people who want to sell plugins to do it (without setting up clunky authentication and so on) and we provide a seamless experience to those who want to use them.
Publishing a plugin, free or paid, will be a prerogative of the developer.
Last, but not least, I personally think that competition (if fair) eventually lead to making things better. And this is our ultimate goal with Volumio = make it the best music player out there.
This requires skill, passion, motivation but also financial resources, hence the “commercial part”.
Side note, you might see that the things that we’ve worked on the most for Volumio3, are the ones that got suggested us in a poll we did in May to understand what our users wanted the most:
Last, consider that it requires us double the effort to do anything, as we are an open source project, trying to grow without betraying FOSS principles (which is freedom of choice). It would be much much more simpler to just do something proprietary, but we truly believe in the FOSS principles and in open ecosystem, so we won’t change this 