Another possibility - and lots of folks do this - would be to reverse-engineer formats all on my own, without pay, but then to sell either format source code, b

Another possibility - and lots of folks do this - would be to reverse-engineer formats all on my own, without pay, but then to sell either format source code, binary executables or specification documents. Each of these work really well for various kinds of applications. The AutoCad binary format is apparently quite complex. To get the written specification, last I checked, while it had been reverse-engineered, the people who accomplished that work charged quite a lot for the spec. On the other hand, that spec is doubtlessly worth lots of money to the kind of people who need it. A while back my ex asked me to buy here a compact digital audio recorder. I picked one up at Fry's for eighty bucks however I did not realized that it only wrote to WMA - and Bonita had an iMac. I asked her to send it back to me so I could exchange it for one that saved to MP3 or Ogg Vorbis or AAC - the "iTunes Audio" format - but no Bonita is quite resourceful, so she purchased an inexpensive WMA to AAC converter utility. That would be quite a lot of work but no doubt the guy who sells the utility makes out like a bandit. I am very much a fan of Free Software, so much so that I personally regard Open Source as The Enemy. So I am uncomfortable with selling executables but not the source. I need a way to pay the rent, so I can't really do all that work then just give away the source for free. However there are many ways to - oh how I hate this word! - "monetize" source code. One way might be to publish it under the Affero GPLv3 license, but then sell proprietary licenses. That's what Trolltech did with Qt. That worked real well for them; we all got KDE, whereas Qt has been for many years a popular framework for purely proprietary applications. Another would be to offer RansomWare. I expect it would be best were I to come out and call it "RansomWare" right up front. Something like a KickStarter campaign, here is a binary, you can see that it really does work, for fifty grand you get the source code. Another idea would be to sell binaries for a year or so, but then publish the source under a Free Software license. Another - and this is what I presently do - would be to just publish the source without expecting any money from it, but with the expectation that hosting the download on my own website would attract consulting clients. There have been times that has worked real well for me but not always, and not lately so I want to get away from doing that. Another take would be to write directly competing applications. One specific reason that it's legal to reverse engineer, is to enable interoperability. Movie Magic Scheduling is quite costly; it would not be hard at all to write a far better competitor in C++ with ZooLib. I wouldn't even need SQLite as ZooLib has - in some respects - a far better database. I expect I would do that in the long run but in the short run, writing a complex application then selling it is a HUGE PITA.