From a long time ago
Can I ask what is it? Coffeebreak? I couldnt find any thing about it.
Reply
David RuttenMcNeel
It’s a plugin which does absolutely nothing, however makes it seem as though your computer is very busy calculating something complicated. Hence, you have no choice but to go and have a coffee while you wait for it to complete.
What?
I don’t understand what you are contributing. Have you read the post?
I was just thanking David Rutten.
Ah, you copy paste two comments instead of paste its links:
You can access this comment link below the comment in the chain with two links.
Please leave this thread exclusively for topics about this plugin.
I do hope so. But…
There is a distinct lack of rigour in the ICO’s documentation which makes its interpretation really difficult. Back when it was the Data Protection Registrar I asked for clarification on an issue of the legislation they were responsible for - they replied that I should consult a lawyer!
So the issue here is the meaning of “deciding how it is processed”.
I think that the intent is “what is it used for” rather than “what mechanism is employed” on the basis of the following example from their web site:
Example
A gym engages a local printing company to produce invitations to a special event the gym is hosting. The gym gives the printing company the names and addresses of its members from its member database, which the printer uses to address the invitations and envelopes. The gym then sends out the invitations.The gym is the controller of the personal data processed in connection with the invitations. The gym determines the purposes for which the personal data is being processed (to send individually addressed invitations to the event) and the means of the processing (mail merging the personal data using the data subjects’ address details). The printing company is a processor processing the personal data only on the gym’s instructions.
On this basis I think your answer to Q4 should be Yes…
Just to show how confusing the interpretation is, Patreon’s terms embody the opposite to Ko-fi’s: Ko-fi want you to be the controller whilst they are the processor, but Patreon want you to be the processor while they are the controller. It might be worth putting this conflict to the ICO and asking them which (if either) is correct.
Regards
Jeremy
p.s. I wholly approve of your original idea. it’s overbearing, over-taxing government I have a problem with.
Thanks for pointing this out. I hope @Dani_Abalde is right but reading this I am afraid not, in that case the coffee will have a bitter after taste 
I like the idea of supporting add-on creators and your component is well done. Great job!
I guess it would be great if McNeel would make an effort on food4rhino, by making an easy, visible option for creators to integrate a PayPal, Ko-fi, Patreon, etc. link on their plug-in page, maybe even a little pop-up that shows before something gets downloaded, but that you could skip. The little Website link is kinda worthless in this regard. The same goes for the PackageManager (Yak).
Apart from the users, they are probably the greatest profiteers from the free plug-in development frenzy that goes on in the community.
In that example the gym is the data controller and data processor and the printing company is a data processor step without responsability for deciding how the data is processed. So, why Q4 should be true?
I think that Ko-fi, Patreon, and the Gym are the data processors since they store and decide how to process the data and the printing company is like the ko-fi user. Both do not decide how to process the data but both process it, which is why the Q2 is yes and Q4 is no.
I have fewer doubts about this than yesterday, but I will ask Ko-fi anyway.
I think adding PayPal and other financial services is something you could do within a plug-in by-yourself. It’s a bit tricky but feasible.
Currently the situation is really bad. People provide plugins for free, and many freelancer earn a lot of money with these tools. Maybe someone or a group of developer should create a Webservice for this purpose and bypassing Food4Rhino. Otherwise anybody profits except the developer themselves…
I completely agree. F4R and YAK should have another button to donate or a skipable popup when you hit download ask you to donate. It’s not that much work. But as mentioned above, discourse should also have it, they are two different targets as I explain later. I have put the paypal link in the description of f4r in some plugin and nobody used it. It’s not very demonstrative because not everyone reads the description carefully, but it shares the same problem that the donation button in F4R would have, and that is that F4R is not designed to be used afterwards, it’s designed to download the plugin and not revisit the download page never again, because even installing with YAK doesn’t have a “leave a review” or “rate your new plugin” or “consider donating to pluginname” something like that when you finish the session with Rhino.
However, that’s only part of it, for developers. I made this plugin for those who help on this forum with definitions mainly, but developers can put in in their sample definitions. The use case is that you download the definition from someone who asks for help, help them and put your ko-fi component in there, and give them the definition. It’s non-invasive, it’s not annoying, it’s in the “wow, thanks” area, and it doesn’t cost anything to put in.
Ko-fi and paypal have webhooks, I know, but I don’t want to offer a service like that because it would require serious formalisation and I don’t have the time and it doesn’t seem like a good market.
McNeel/F4R doesn’t do it, they are who have the reasons to do it, why should I do it or anyone else, who already does enough developing plugins for his platform?
I don’t think Ko-fi is bad as an intermediary and I don’t think it has the legal problems mentioned above, it is widely used in the programming community. You can find a lot of libraries on Github that can be sponsored using Ko-fi.
This community is too used to getting everything for free. I think the reasonable thing to do first is to see if this Ko-fi component works, if the community repays the generosity of a few. If this happens, then there would be hope for a more time consuming project like that.
Great idea.
It would be even greater if there was a way for developers to thank their plugin users for the coffee with some sort of “in-game asset”.
If there’s no other incentive for users than the altruism of sharing a coffee with the developer, not many people will actually want to pay 3$ no matter how nice they are as a person. But this would change if they received something in return - it might be an example artwork asset, an extra tutorial video, or ideally some native Rhino asset like extra plugin functionality etc. etc. - just something that provides a little value.
Some developers just don’t want to go down the official way of adopting a full-blown licensing system using Zoo etc for their plugin, but they would still rather not do it for free, or just the occasional coffee from one out of 10000 users …
You already get the plug-in for free! Do you really have to get another bonus feature?
Or maybe they like the idea of free or even open-source software?
Also those who chose to accept donations, probably neither expect it to be a fully-fledged business model, nor that every user can/has/will donate.
Ko-fi allows you to create your own shop and offer exclusive content, although I haven’t explored it yet. That’s where you can include that additional paid content.
With Peacock I have migrated to Discord and one of the reasons is that it allows me to gamify the content, to align the user’s interest with my interest in making it productive, because unlike Discourse, Discord is highly configurable with bots, it is an amazing beautiful app done for the future of content creators. However I have not yet reached the point to validate this so there is nothing to show yet, I hope to do so in a year. At the moment that server is for the patreons of Peacock.
I also have a WIP personal Discord server and I would like to invite everyone to join, to anyone who wants to talk to me directly (here for example you have to wait for me to come in, I don’t open the personal email either…), to solve doubts about GH or my plugins or development or collab with me or anything else. Discord also offers screen sharing, video calls, audio channels and more. Discourse is better in some features, but overall for me it is not better than Discord. I think all open source developers should use Discord as a collective development platform shared with users (there are many already, for example Three.js or the gh plugin Wasp are on Discord). For now you can only sell games in their shop, but I’ve already asked them to generalize it to other products and I’m sure they will do it someday because it would be a massive feature for content creators.
I have asked the ICO for their position on this type of service and the different stances taken by Ko-fi and Patreon, and the implication for the need to register. I will post on any advice received from them.
Personally I think there will be more discussion than actual profit from it, because looking at the donation levels for most popular open-source software, you can see that reaaally small percentage of people are willing to donate, when we compare it to the number of users. I’d say that maybe there is 0.1%, so for a 1000 users you will maybe get 5 dollar once. Well, it’s better than nothing, but still is it worth it then?
I’m looking forward to see stats in the future though! 