Re: ImageJ Plugins shop

Posted by pushkarparanjpe on Apr 09, 2017; 11:32pm
URL: http://imagej.273.s1.nabble.com/ImageJ-Plugins-shop-tp5018455p5018480.html

I thank you all for your valuable time in analyzing the issues and articulating your responses. I really appreciate the suggestions, comments and even alternative monetization strategies that were suggested here, as they will be crucially instrumental in shaping imagejplugins.com

I want to clarify that this project does not intend to monetize core ImageJ code or the Fiji distribution. Free plugins available in the public domain will continue to be freely available. These will not be sold. In fact, we want to help in making these tools more easily discoverable so that they are accessible to a newer and wider audience. For e.g. this will enable fresh graduate students and newcomers to the image analysis field in finding the ImageJ tool that solves their problem.

Plugins submitted to our registry will always be open source, documented and supported by the author developer. The author has the option to choose to make their code available free of cost or for a price. The author owns the copyright of the submitted piece of work and chooses the sale license. Any submitted work will be accepted only after a review process that ascertains that it meets strict quality standards. Also, by allowing customer ratings, reviews and discussions on an individual plugin page we are creating a direct channel of communication between the end-user and the plugin developer author that will enable plugin maintenance and support.

ImageJ is currently used by a group of people who are technically quite proficient and who were typically introduced to it by osmosis in an academic lab environment. A large majority of workers in technical domains are outside academic research labs. They too deserve their first encounter with ImageJ, perhaps followed by extensive hand-holding and training. These people will spread the word about ImageJ and the community can grow exponentially. We intend to supplement the existing ImageJ literature with constantly updated tutorial and blog content to educate newcomers and power-users about ImageJ.

We believe, there is a still larger number of people for whom computer programming/algorithm-design/image-analysis is outside their comfort zone, but can benefit immensely from the user-friendliness and customizability of the ImageJ platform. Computer science engineers, on the other hand, who have the ability to write code do not necessarily have visibility into the real challenges faced by people working with image data. We want these two sections of the technical community to find and interact with each other via imagejplugins.com and use the ImageJ platform as a medium to work collaboratively.

As we develop and grow imagejplugins.com we would love to discuss such issues with you as we believe it will only help make it better and realize its full potential. Thanking you!

Pushkar
imagejplugins.com