Useful Feature - should be provided by Atlassian!

[T H]

This question is in reference to Atlassian Documentation: Using validators with custom fields

The validators are extremly useful. But they depend on a 3rd-party plugin, which may be discontinued at any time. Not a relieable base for a product decision towards jira ...

Such important features should be a supported part of the JIRA software!

[Dave Thomas]

I see that JSU is now becoming a paid plugin, following the very path that DTH was concerned about above.   We've been hit by this repeatedly and honestly, it leaves a bad taste because it feels like a bait and switch:  "Here, try this *free* plugin!"  Then later, it becomes a paid plugin and you're forced to either pay or disrupt your business to unwind the dependency.

It feels particularly wrong to pay for JSU when the code was essentially stolen from the original developer.   I know the licensing used by the original developer allows Atlassian and Beecom to do what they're doing and I understand the economics Beecom faces in trying to support and improve JSU.   But still, it's got to really sting Gustavo to see someone else charging for the plugin he wrote and provided to the community for free.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I agree with you on the JSU, especially as it's 12 years old.  Atlassian should have bought it outright by now and included it in JIRA.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Actually, the JIRA Suite Utilities are a good example of how Atlassian look after us.

The JSU add-on was a very early add-on for JIRA.  An enterprising developer wrote the original and gave it to us. 

Atlassian have a lot of respect for their partners, users and the community in general.  Rather than write their own version and build it into JIRA, they respected the developer's willingness to share his work, and deliberately stayed away from providing competing functions, so that he could grow the product as he saw fit, and, probably more importantly, they weren't stomping on his Intellectual Property!

But, something went wrong.  As far as I know, there's only been two (semi-public) disagreements between Atlassian and one of their (ex-)partners.  This was one of them.

At some point, they had a disagreement about support and provision of the add-on.  The developer pulled it completely, leaving a lot of us hanging and uncertain.  I seem to remember 10 days of uncertainty, but it was treated as a top priority by Atlassian.  They couldn't negotiate taking ownership of the JSU, but they did negotiate BeeCom taking full ownership while remaining independent of Atlassian, and I understand that the deal included the right to move it to another 3rd party again if BeeCom don't want to look after it any more.

So, although it's not an Atlassian add-on, it's not going to go away.  There are a lot of other non-Atlassian add-ons which they consider to have a similar level of importance, meaning that if something does go wrong, they will step in and somehow make sure the functions remain available.

[T H]

Well, beecom seems to be fast in providing version compatible to new JIRA releases (as far this could be decided from the limited information in the release notes and reviews), 

I do appreciate that Atlassian takes care about third party addons also, but can I rely on this in future? Therefore I will think twice before using a free plugin in such a central thing like my JIRA workflows.

Several examples (e.g. table filter plugin, Survey and Vote Macros, Panelbox Add-on) in confluence do make me worried about:

• You find some little useful plugin and people will start using it in their spaces.
• At some day new versions of the plugin become commercial. They may have more features than before. But maybe you do not need the new features.
• Unfortunately you can't remain on the old, free version because the plugins will not be compatible with newer versions of confluence.
• So you have to decide to either pay for the plugin in future or to tell your users to remove the plugin from their content.

So the decision for JIRA or Confluence should not made on base of the plugins available but rather on base of the implemented features of the product itself. Unfortunately both in JIRA and in confluence some important features are missing ...

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Atlassian have a deliberate policy of (mostly) not implementing things that their partner companies have products for.  You're always going to have the risk of something going commercial, or drifting away from what you need it to do.