Sponsoring new features in Sulu

Our goal since founding this project has been to create a sustainable business model for the Sulu project.

In a review of the “unseen labor” in open source, Nadia Eghbal writes that “Money has been a taboo topic for open source projects since the early days of the free software movement.” But the reality is that people need to be paid for their work.

When developers and agencies choose open source projects, they want to know how reliable those projects are. By making sure our business is generating income, we make sure Sulu is maintained and supported.

Every business built on open source products has to consider these questions. How can we resolve this ethically and practically? What business model will help us ensure our company is sustainable?

The Sulu content management platform will always be open source. We currently generate our income through a mix of services including consulting, training and custom development. Focussing on these services diverts our time away from developing new Sulu features. When the community directly sponsors features, it means we can dedicate our time to development of the product, creating a better Sulu for everyone.

We know that a time-based release schedule works best for the Sulu project. Time-based releases help projects keep momentum and motivate contributors. We don’t commit to features, we commit to release dates. As a result, we don't have a traditional roadmap. We can't promise features, but we do stick to our release schedule.

Sometimes we need to focus on keeping up with developments in Symfony or JavaScript. That work is the minimum requirement for keeping up with dependencies just to stay up to date.

Sometimes we have to focus on generating revenue with custom development. The truth is, if we didn’t have to focus on generating revenue, we could prioritize the project. That’s why we’re inviting the community to Sponsor Features in Sulu.

If you really want to see a feature in Sulu, but it’s not yet on our radar, funding can help us prioritize it. It means we can defer revenue-generating services and focus on Sulu itself.

In Sulu 2.2, we were able to add several popular features thanks to generous help from our sponsors. Now everyone gets to use these features.

• Copying pages across webspaces, thanks to MADSACK Mediengruppe.
• Use image maps for engaging visualizations, thanks to MASSIVE ART
• Error-free content copying thanks to a bugfix, sponsored by thenetexperts.

If you’d like to see your feature on this list, talk with us.

Help us keep Sulu sustainable! We’d love to hear your thoughts. We charge the work “at-cost” and also invest our own time in building these features, which helps us keep the possibilities open.

If Sulu is generating revenue for your digital agency, talk with your organization about the possibility of contributing to Sulu or sponsoring a feature. If you're a freelance or solo developer, sponsorship may be out of reach but any contributions of your time, reviews, or helping others in Slack helps Sulu. When you contribute, it also helps us keep Sulu sustainable.

We have a vision for Sulu, so we can't guarantee that every sponsored feature will make it into Sulu core. However, we may be able to release it in another package. We’ll work with you to figure out the implementation plan and scope of work.

If there’s a limitation to overcome, or an opportunity to improve Sulu for your project, it's highly likely that many other Sulu users will benefit from the same feature. So, let’s work together!