I’m sure there must be expenses involved.
Modx LLC runs a business of course, with large customers and a base of developers for that task. On top of that, they provide Modx (base framework) for free and open source.
The expenses of the Modx LLC business I think these are not public.
But all this is part of Modx LLC business model, and I truly hope that the company will remain wealthy so all of us can continue to have Modx for free and OS, with the great quality that we’ve been used to.
More here:
https://modx.com/about/company
Cheers
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With questions like this I do think it’s important to emphasise the difference between “MODX” and “MODX LLC”.
The first is the open source project. Free for anyone to use and contribute to.
There’s a small group of people who essentially maintain the project (“core integrators”) who decide what proposals go it into the core. With some exceptions, the core integrators involved with the daily development these days are not paid by or formally involved with MODX LLC. Most of them are self-employed, for example I earn my income with premium extras while others do freelance development.
MODX LLC is a for-profit company. The people who founded it a decade or so ago led the original development of MODX and have indeed sponsored a lot of development work over the years.
When I worked for MODX LLC in 2012/2013, professional services was a very large chunk of the revenue pie. Basically development/support services, geared towards the bigger clients/complex projects.
Around that time is also when MODX Cloud was being built up. While there have been a few… detours, from what I understand MODX Cloud is now the primary revenue driver for MODX LLC and profitable. They still offer professional services too.
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There are of course expenses involved when talking about MODX the project. With the exception of people as mentioned before, many on-going costs like servers/services are covered by MODX LLC.
Other community-led initiatives may have other sponsors. MODX.today and the new docs are sponsored by modmore. MODX.pro is part of the modhost/modstore business.
There’s also the MODX Advisory Board (MAB) which tries to form long-term strategies/goals for the project. Those people are also (with some exceptions) independent from MODX LLC with their time “donated” by their employers or free time.
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Mark, you have become a really important member of the ecosystem over the last years, cheers for your efforts, I have even seen you share proprietary code to solve a specific need here in the forums.
I didn’t think about how the cloud also drives platform adoption, also things like Fred help, and now with these clean new forums adoption gets even easier…all Modx ever needed was for the user base to grow to a certain level
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