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I understand you want to be compensated for your work, but the world doesn't reward engineering effort by itself. If you want to run a software business, do tha
by gizmo 3y ago
I understand you want to be compensated for your work, but the world doesn't reward engineering effort by itself. If you want to run a software business, do that. If you want to run an open source project, do that. But it makes no sense to go for some kind of hybrid commercial open core project simply because you've put a lot of effort in and you feel entitled to a monetary reward.
Legally, it's fine. But your plan as described is highly unlikely to work. As others have pointed out, open core is harder than closed source, because you can only charge for the difference between the open source version and the commercial version, and that represents only a small amount of the total effort you've put in. On top of that, your main audience consists of people who really prefer not to pay for software.
- nirui 3y agoI do understand that, but currently my open source projects don't bring any monetary benefit at all, and my user base is too small to provide enough donation to support the development. So under this circumstance, any payment is way better than none payment. Plus, I also designed the system in such way that it allows me to vastly extend it's functionality based on the same base code. So in theory I could make a big enough feature-gap between the two. > On top of that, your main audience consists of people who really prefer not to pay for software. I thought about this as well. But doing a pure close sourced product is unlikely to cover these people too. Sure, making the product open source might convert some paying users away to use the open source version, but at least I earned the trust of these users (and hopefully made them happy), still not a bad out come from the open source perspective :)