Description
This is a broad strokes feature proposal; I'm motivated to develop it further and implement it if it is of interest to the cookiecutter team.
The problem: Cookiecutter templates represent an expression of knowledge, experience, and opinion. The templates take time to develop, as does the knowledge and experience that leads to their development.
In parallel, the open source community has a general problem with fundraising.
There is, and will always be, a place for fully open, public repositories sharing cookiecutter templates. However, the expertise contained in cookiecutter templates also represents an opportunity for monetisation - selling access to templates.
I'm not proposing to add credit card processing or any of the financial side of the process to cookiecutter. What I'm proposing is modifications that would enable an end user to use a template in a way that is compatible with monetisation.
This could take many forms, including, but not necessarily limited to:
- Cloning private URLs (is this possible already?)
- Template rollout from password protected zip files, encrypted bundles, etc.
- "non-cacheable" flags for templates, so that the the raw template is never saved permanently.
- "registration keys" that can be entered at time of use that contain pre-set values for certain template values (for example, a template for a website might have
domain_nameas a template key; the registration key would set this value in the template, rather than making it user-customisable. - Pinging a registration server to receive decryption keys or registration keys and track usage.
These changes are mostly intended to modify Cookiecutter in such a way that an end user can use a template, without seeing the raw template; and, beyond that, constrain the use of the template to those use cases that have been paid for (by install count, target, or whatever)
I don't imagine that these changes will be piracy proof. At the end of the day, you have to transmit the bytes. A motivated individual could get those bytes, and thus the template, and give it away. These measures are aimed at making it easier to do the right thing.
I expect that this proposal will be at least mildly controversial, because it relies on "hiding" information (the template), which some might object to because of an aggressive "everything should be free as in freedom" worldview. My argument here is that what a cookiecutter template provides is "distilled expertise" - it's consulting without actually paying for the dedicated time of a consultant. Providing a mechanism to require people to pay for that expertise is, in some regards, the exact model that free software advocates often point to as a reliable model for funding open source. The only difference is that the role of the consultant has been automated.
Is this an idea that the cookiecutter core team finds interesting?