Extensions and BoonEx Developers + some good news.

One common gripe is that there's a "conflict of interest" when core team developers are selling their own products, that "should be in the default package". I'd like to shed some light on this topics and on our position about it.

All BoonEx developers' work and pay is performance-based. They do everything that's requested for future version by myself and AlexT (our tech director). We never look at if there's a modification/extension/plugin at Unity that already does it when deciding what to include. Once the decision is made, however, we do look, for only one reason: if we could save time/money just taking over it or if we should develop it from scratch.

In the past, we had a few cases when BoonEx developers integrated their products into Dolphin core, simply because we planned to include this functionality and they happened to have it. Thus, for example, ESASE integrated his "Spy block on homepage, and Rayz integrated "Membership Levels Manager"  for Chat and Messenger.  When product is of good quality, complies with our Development Guidelines and the functionality is planned for next version - we talk to our developers and they include their products.

At their free time, BoonEx developers are allowed to work as independent traders and choose what they want to do as they please. Some of them sub-contract and even have their own groups of developers. This way we have professionals that are genuinely interested in the success of Dolphin and its popularity growth. They can be growing their own business and remain closely attached to the development of the default package.

You may ask why don't we add product X and product Z then? As with any functionality, when we add something, our responsibility is a lot wider than that of Unity Market traders. Default package is used by thousands, on dozens of different setups and we need to factor that in. We have to be super-careful. Even when an extension is getting tens of good reviews, it may not meet our guidelines, or may have certain support requirements that we are not ready to to handle yet. In short, we do it sometimes, but only with things that are really needed and are written very well.

and some good news...

We have a preliminary agreement with AQBsoft and AntonLV for integration of their Page Access Control into Dolphin 7.1. They are now updating this extension, preparing for inclusion. This one should fit default package very well and would bring some important core functionality.