Not to beat a dead horse, but perhaps I should have referred to works in progress of uncertain status and quality. Once someone builds one of those and uses it in a patch, it is very hard to trace the lineage and how to clean things up, particularly for less technical users, but even for those of us with lots of experience who should be able to sort it out but perhaps may not think as fast as we did in our younger days.
Truly that is all I’m saying on this. No really 
Maybe I would, but I think it’s more due to the culture of it. FOSS projects struggle with this a lot, even really big ones that run most of the internet infrastructure.
That said I should probably donate to Bogaudio too…
I would add: please please show your appreciation for our third-party devs. Send them clips of you loving their modules, tell them if you love what they do and if you possibly can, please donate.
@Aria_Salvatrice I should add, we are aiming for this to be a diverse, inclusive, welcoming place.
FWIW, I think so. The Library is invaluable, that goes without saying. I think there are things that could be done to inject a bit more personality into those brand pages though, and making them easier to get to without feeling like you’re using a module search engine - which it is, of course, but you can get very similar page layouts with similar content, and sometimes the donate link is there, sometimes it isn’t, and it isn’t very prominent, and would be more compelling to click through to if accompanied by biog, persona, stance on donation, basically all those things you’ve already mentioned, and which I very much agree with 
Actually, a declared stance on donation would be extremely important, IMO. I’ve come across examples of FOSS where the developer explicitly discourages any donation! “I don’t do this for money, and I don’t need any”, that kind of thing. Stating what that support would mean to a developer can be very powerful.
Ouch. When we first launched MindMeld and MixMaster we did okay on donations for a while - maybe around 30 people donated in the first year? Something like that iirc.
In the last 6 months I can count the donations on one… finger. 
And pretty much everyone uses our modules - if that’s what we’re getting I often wonder if many devs are getting anything at all.
We did have one awesome person last year who made a quite extraordinary donation - he single handedly doubled the donation income for the year. Huge thanks to him and everyone else who has donated.
My son watches Warzone streamers who take thousands of dollars a night in donations from people watching them play computer games…
It’s a funny old world.
@steve I could be wrong but I suspect it’s something along the lines of that people don’t mind spending money on entertainment but resent spending money on tools. I wish in the case of VCV plugin developers that wasn’t true though.
Hmm. I’m not completely sure about that. I think it’s more about making it easy - and keeping the idea of donating in mind.
Twitch etc. certainly bend over backwards to make it easy - after all, that’s what the whole platform revolves around. I’ve done it often myself, handing over £1 just to play a scary noise or fart sound on the stream 
I don’t think it’s an entertainment vs. tools thing - though in a way, or to certain people, noodling on Rack can be entertainment - and how all that is adapted to work when you’re fiddling around in a modular synthesis program, I’m not sure… But I think there could be ways.
Totally! As stated I could be (and maybe even likely am) wrong.
Hmm yes this isn’t really surprising unfortunately. It’s a small market outside of the VCV library too, very few people are willing to pay for professional quality VST plugins even.
It’s just a matter of numbers, Twitch has 140 million active users.
I’m not sure we’ll ever hit the thousands of dollars a day but I think you’re right. Currently the donate link is hidden away in a submenu of the right-click menu of a module - right next to the manual link that no one ever reads 
Donations and the culture around donating could certainly be promoted more.
Here’s an idea: I don’t think it would be necessarily a bad thing to have occasional popups on free modules that encouraged the user to donate (and once they donated, they would not get any more popups from that plugin). It could be something like "You have now added modules from this developer to your patch 50 times - why not send them a donation to say thanks . Then again at 100 times etc…
I don’t necessarily want to nag people into donating, and it’s questionably a donation if you’re getting the benefit of not being annoyed in return. I also don’t think VCV has a way to track donations or wants to implement one, for a variety of tax reasons. Where I do think a donation nag might be reasonable is in the library webpage. It could nag on collection add to say “Hey, would you like to donate to this developer?”
Here’s the problem I see with that.
I don’t know about you, but the only time I’m likely to go onto a plugin’s page on the library is when I’m first subscribing to it and at that point I haven’t used the modules so I don’t know if they are any good and whether they will be useful to me or not, so I’m not ready to donate yet.
Once I’m using a plugin I rarely, if ever, visit that plugin on the library site again as there is no need for me to - so it doesn’t really matter what you do with the donate button there - you could make it full screen and I’m still not going to see it.
The only time I’ll likely visit that plugin on the site again is to unsubscribe from it if I don’t use it - and I’m highly unlikely to donate at that point.
Therefore something in the app that was triggered by usage would work much better I think. A reminder for users to donate towards the modules they actually use a lot. I take your point about tracking donations though so perhaps a simple ‘honesty checkbox’ might work to stop the nags - “I’ve already donated to this developer”.
You could always try live module development on Twitch? Streaming is harder than it looks though.
Something tells me that might not be quite so entertaining I guess people might pay us to stop though?
I have seen people actually doing software development on Twitch. I don’t actually watch it much myself though.
How about an agreed percentage share of the sales proceeds from Rack 2 Pro are distributed to the module developers on the basis of the number of users/downloaders/usage of their free V2 modules in the library?
You just said what everyone has been avoiding 
This would be great in the long run but trying to come up with a fair system of distribution would be difficult I think… just as a thought experiment:
Based on number of users/downloads in library? - unfair advantage to those developers who have had plugins in libraries the longest - modules which might not be used much now at all.
Based on current usage/how often modules are added to a patch? - Hmmm our mixer gets used by lots of people but is very often in a template so doesn’t necessarily get added from browser much. And this adding could be easily manipulated - get all your friends to download VCV and keep adding your modules 
Equal distribution? - then anyone could make a very basic module and submit it to library for a slice of the pie.
etc…
Sorry - it just seemed the obvious thing to say…
You raise fair points about how to implement such a distribution system fairly but surely if there was a will there would be a way - you are after all, all software developers.
The usage count could start from the release date of VCV2 or perhaps each run of a module is anonymously logged. Users worried about privacy could opt out of any polling.
(FWIW I bought your MindMeld Pro - it’s an amazing module and I use it all the time).