Kind of a dumb "Market" question...

I've been looking around at all the "mods" and what people charge and all the shenanigans and also noticing that there's a factor of sloppiness to it all.

I'm wondering how financially sound it would be if I pursued mod development & sold such mods through the Boonex Market?  I mean, I would guess that mods are ripped off, shared, and the support headache is rather large depending on how mangled someone's existing install is to begin with.  There's also the headache of the rather convoluted code base and limited documentation.

I'm asking because I want to know how large of an honest/ethical audience I would have access to if I decided to code together various mods/enhancements and make them available (affordably, $10-25 ea., $40 for complex ones) in the Market.  If there's only 50 people here who would actually buy such things and be ethical & not pirate/share them, then it's not worth it.  But if even just 1 or 2 mods were of interest to 1,000+ existing D7 website owners, then it could be worth my time.  The thing is, I don't actually see many sites that I could tell run D7, it's hard to tell what the penetration is, even harder to know how much of that penetration places any value in the Market.

I can do magical things with web site back-ends, but I usually keep those efforts to myself.  I don't have any time at all for developing things open source, so this really would only be something I take seriously if the financial reward was fair.

Honesty & Ethics:  The vast majority of people by nature are honest and ethical, unfortunately there is only 1 way to ensure your mods are not mass pirated, and even that means is not 100% fool proof.  That is to do the install of all your mods yourself and not allow anyone to have your source code prior to install.  Unfortunately, there are some amazing file/DB comparison tools out there that will be utilized by some for the sole purpose of finding all the modified code/additional files  & db tables/columns and put it all back together to resell.  That is a risk all of us who do mods take.

Market:  Depending on the item, there is a large demand for it or no demand for it with all levels in between.  What I have noticed is that when I post a mod up for free hundreds of copies fly out within a few days, but as soon as you put a price on it, the demand significantly drops as many are not prepared to pay for the code.

Support:  Yes, there are many, many, many hacked up sites out there.  If you offer the items for people to download and install themselves you will be hit with an inordinate amount of questions because it doesn't work on their site out of the box.  This is due to the site being mis-modded and having errors before they even tried to install your mod, because they screwed up the install (we all do that, yes I have made simple typo errors while modding and had to go hunt for them, we all have), because they have no clue what they are doing and put all the files/code strings in the wrong places, because they upload the files in a non-binary mode, just because they are idiots.  It happens and you will have to deal with it.

D7 has only been out for a little over a month.  Those running it are still getting it up and running, tweaking, labeling, testing and so on.  As time goes on you will see more and more D7 sites just like you see WordPress, phpBB3 and many other types of sites out there. 

Is it worth it?  The question is up to you, and only you can decide it.  Can you make a little extra cash doing mods?  Yes.  Do you have to list them and allow download of them in the market?  No and No.  You can post them in the market without a download, you install it only or you can do them like many, no market listing, just word of mouth. 

Personally, I'd rather do an entire site build for someone starting with the install and moving up from there than to sell them a couple of mods.  At least then I know every string of code in it and that it works when I'm finished.  Gawd do I hate digging through others code.

"D7 has only been out for a little over a month."

LOL you're kidding me.  I honest-to-god didn't know that.  I chose to use it over other CMS for a specific purpose because it wasn't a full-blown CMS, was open PHP (albeit CC license), and on the surface handles most social media features out-of-box that other CMS systems make developers contort for weeks to get the same result.  Modding from there, however, is an incredible chore and it breaks easily when one minor thing is done wrong.

I've finished tweaking my own install to my satisfaction so far after 2 weeks and migrated a member database of almost 40,000 people, full template re-do, a few enhancements, modifications and database adjustments.  I'm probably not running into as many issues as others as I don't care about the "Ray" features.  If I were to start over from the beginning, it would only take me 2-3 days to retrace all my steps.

I'm mostly thinking of a modular approach, very much like how WordPress handles plugins.  Just looking at the code, it would seem I'd have to contort more to inject a mod into the core code stream & output rather than fit the mod into a little box like it seems most do or treat a few line changes in a text file with instructions as a "mod" when such mods should really be described as "code hacks".

I understand about the ethics thing, I'm not interested in the extra effort it would take to obfuscate the code, nor am I interested in installing for people as a way to protect.  I kinda just want a reasonable idea of the "ethical" audience reach the mod market for D6/D7 has and I can then do the math to figure out if it's worth my time.  I would focus on modules that install like actual modules but integrate tightly into page rendering in all facets without overwriting the core code or trampling on the code or functionality of another mod.