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It's turtles all the way down. Selling your library sounds like a great deal if your B2B sales don't dry up and the investors buy into your story. But then you

It's turtles all the way down. Selling your library sounds like a great deal if your B2B sales don't dry up and the investors buy into your story. But then you reach a pit of disillusionment where you realize that you relied on free software more than your own work, and probably ran up quite the karmic deficit selling whatever product you made. Maybe you decide that you don't care, but you have to reason with it somehow. I think a lot of people lash out at the entrepreneurial spirit because a business venture inherently necessitates risk. Your audience is not going to reward high-risk plays, and if your business proposition threatens their use-case enough then they'll probably protest. That train of logic isn't "diehard linux/FOSS" in my mind but more just holding someone to their own standards. Making a living out of coding is one thing, but turning your passion project into a business is another. If simple abrasive comments are what made them quit Open Source, I can't imagine how long they'd last trying to sell people a Javascript library.

CRConrad 3y ago
> Selling your library sounds like a great deal if your B2B sales don't dry up and the investors buy into your story. What "investors"?!? As a single developer, you need a computer and an Internet connection. Where do the six-(or seven-, or eight-)figure amounts of Venture Capital investment come in? > But then you reach a pit of disillusionment where you realize that you relied on free software more than your own work, and probably ran up quite the karmic deficit selling whatever product you made. That's what the LGPL is for: Even if you release your actual product only under a commercial license, you can help improve the tools you use, to pay back your karma to the community that enables you to do the whole thing in the first place. (Disclaimer: This is the only way I can see being able to both make a living as a one-man software development company and participate in / contribute to FOSS... But I haven't taken the leap of faith, put my living where my mouth is. (Yet.) So this could all be hot air.)

CRConrad 3y ago

> Selling your library sounds like a great deal if your B2B sales don't dry up and the investors buy into your story. What "investors"?!? As a single developer, you need a computer and an Internet connection. Where do the six-(or seven-, or eight-)figure amounts of Venture Capital investment come in? > But then you reach a pit of disillusionment where you realize that you relied on free software more than your own work, and probably ran up quite the karmic deficit selling whatever product you made. That's what the LGPL is for: Even if you release your actual product only under a commercial license, you can help improve the tools you use, to pay back your karma to the community that enables you to do the whole thing in the first place. (Disclaimer: This is the only way I can see being able to both make a living as a one-man software development company and participate in / contribute to FOSS... But I haven't taken the leap of faith, put my living where my mouth is. (Yet.) So this could all be hot air.)