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>if you thought that other people would be interested enough in this software that they might pay for it, why did you put in all the effort up front to develop

>if you thought that other people would be interested enough in this software that they might pay for it, why did you put in all the effort up front to develop it yourself? Why didn't you instead make the project open source much earlier, so that you wouldn't have to pay all the costs of developing it yourself? "If you knew people might pay you money for it, why didn't you make it so they didn't have to, instead of making them pay money for it?" What?

rwl 12y ago
My point was this: presumably, Spearchucker wanted this software because it was useful to him, not just because it might be useful to someone else. Getting it had a cost: the time and effort to develop it. He could either take on that whole cost himself up front, and try to recover it from other users when the program was finished, or he could share the cost with other users starting from an earlier stage by starting an open source project. If you're primarily concerned with having the program completed, why take the first path? The second path seems like it will bring you to that goal more quickly and for less time, effort, and risk. It just makes more sense. And even if you're primarily concerned with making money, the second path can still make more sense. Using funding mechanisms like Kickstarter, you can be paid to write software that you release under an open source license -- and since your backers commit to payment up front, before you write the code, you don't have to take on the risk that no one buys a license for the completed program. So again, why go the other route?