I find that I am happier if I do NOT mix making money with doing hobbies. That does not prevent my tendency to find a way to to mix my hobby and professional projects, which probably not that healthy for me. But, I’m retired for good now and am able to just play, which not everyone is.
I have absolutely no problem with developers who choose to develop paid plugins and modules. I’ve purchased quite a few.
It never occurred to me that anyone would be a full time VCV module dev as a way to keep a roof over their heads, but I suppose if you did start making money from modules it’d have to be declared income, potentially having to let my employer know etc so can understand why maybe more people haven’t taken that route and go the free with tip jar route. My assumption is that the people who do that are a mix of self-employed/contractors, students and (semi) retired people, but maybe in general it’s not enough income to trouble the taxman.
I am not a dev, so I look at it from a user’s perspective, but I think it would be a disaster if every collection in VCV was active and every day there was a new module from another collection.
Oh my god CloudSeed in VCV would be amazing. Thank you!
It seems a lot like “passive income” to me as opposed to a whole job- making a few modules and putting them in a collection would (hopefully) generate a bit of cashflow over a long period of time.
Personally, I love it when devs recognize their worth and start charging a bit for their new plugins. It garners some support for all their hard work.
It is amazing how a missing word typo changes the whole meaning of a post 
Exactly. I would strongly advise anyone considering commercial VCV Rack module development as a full time job to support their family to seriously explore other options haha (with the exception of Andrew of course).
But as a way to generate some income from a hobby or something you enjoy doing anyway, it’s great. Especially if your hobby involves buying hardware modules 
One lesson I have learned: Rack users generally, don’t tend to donate (there are exceptions of course and thanks to those of you that have!). I can count donations to MindMeld in the last year on one hand. And I could still do so if I chopped off two of my fingers… on the other hand a surprising number of Rack users seem happy to part with their hard-earned for commercial modules they like.
Seems like a pretty good portfolio project as well as just being fun, if you need something like that.
Absolutely. The free MM plugin currently has 42k+ downloads. There are no angry users and it requires very little ongoing time/effort to support 
That’s something an employer or client might well be interested in (even if they have no particular interest in modular synthesis).
Even if you aren’t making money, sometimes this is a requirement.
My employment contract for example means that any IP I create (of a technological nature) is automatically owned by my employer.
In order to release my free plugin I had to submit the entire codebase (such as it was at the time) to a committee for review to obtain an invention copyright waiver.
For this reason alone I very rarely spend effort on personal tech projects…
not surprised, sounds an enormous ball ache.
I remember you mentioning this before.
I’ve nearly always worked for myself so no idea what’s common practice in your industry - but that does sound like a pretty harsh contract to me.
If my employer decided they should own everything I produce in my free time, I would interpret that as not really having any free time and then rather than my employer paying me for 8 hours per day, they should really be paying me for 24 hours per day.
“Sure you can have the rights to my free Rack plugin, but you’ll need to treble my salary”
Its pretty common in the tech industry, but yeah it does suck
I think for a lot of jobs that have this its not quite as bad as for me, because most employers don’t have the scope that mine does… unfortunately for me, pretty much everything in the tech world could be considered as competition to the company I work for…
Honestly, that’s a really shitty contract. In my (permanent) contract I have it locked down that I am allowed to do both business and personal projects outside of work, as long as this doesn’t compete with my employer. Considering that my $dayjob is working on a highly specific product for which there is pretty much no competition, means that I can do whatever I want in my personal time
(the chances of me working on anything that could be considered “competition” is really as close to 0 as practically possible)
Not everyone has that chance. Even big players like Google insist on putting such clauses in their contract.
Sometimes though you can end up working for making products you actively develop free competitive alternatives for… 
But hey, you can repurpose what you learn on one side and benefit the other.
@falkTX , the legend…
is there a chance to have a port of your software for Jack in the VCV rack?
I would love to have a “Carla Module” among others well made Jack modules
It’s already available in Cardinal.
I thought about this before, and I would have gone for it if there was a chance to have Carla and other modules as commercial entries on the VCV library. Price would be kinda symbolic, 1eur or something like that, just as a way to pay for the convenience and integration service (ie, precompiled binaries, auto-updates).
After speaking with Andrew, I was informed that commercial modules on the VCV library must be proprietary. With the idea that users will be upset if they see they have to pay for something they can get elsewhere for free (I disagree with that assessment btw)
So I gave up after that.
IMO opensource commercial modules would be a great way to fund development of Rack modules. Users pay for the integration and convenience, not exactly for the software itself. Those that dont mind getting hands dirty and building it themselves could do that of course, but there would be no autoupdates or official support. We know by now that donations do not really cover costs for pretty much anything, people skip paying when there is an option to do so.
With this same logic one would expect that “free modules in the VCV Library must be opensource” … which is unfortunately not the case :#