No. You don't need to polish it further. If it were free right now, I'd be using it today and helping you polish it. As it is, yeah, I feel disrespected. You want my free help (or the free help of other somebodies like me) but you want to be paid for your work. Obviously.

Sorry, I really don't mean to be That Guy, but you are not coming across as anything like sympathetic, and I am 100% your target audience.

Light Table is a darling of the community, but I get the same vibe there. Although, to be honest, he's got a huge (yet unspecified) vision and is asking to be "freed up" to work on it, whereas you've scratched your own itch and already have a working project but want to be paid before you'll let people use it.

If you want my advice (which is worth as much as it costs you) put it on Github now and offer a supported, shrinkwrapped version for sale. Then you get paid, at least more than you're paid now, while still having an open source project.

"But nobody will buy it if they can just download it," you say, and you may be right - or maybe not. It's worth a try. Sell a souped-up version, sell corporate bulk contracts with support, I don't know. There are lots of open source business models that have been applied with varying success.

But don't, for the love of God, sell your time to the open source community.

"You want my free help" that makes me wonder. I thought of it more like this: I'm selling the basic software once-off so that afterwards anyone can customize it as he/she pleases. For my taste, it's good enough so that i can use it :) so i'm not really asking for free help. I'm asking for money so that i can share my toys with everyone ;)

But you both make a very valid point for making it open source as soon as possible. And it seems as if you have a good overview of the ways to monetize open source. Do you know how companies any of those Open Source companies ensure that none of their competitors just downloads all the source code and sells their exact same product?

> I'm asking for money so that i can share my toys with everyone ;)

This is the part that I pointed out generally doesn't work. I mean, tough love time: everyone wants to be paid to work on their own open source project. No one wants to pay you to do that. No one. At best, people may want your project (as part of their product, for example) and be willing to pay you (perhaps indirectly) just to know that it's maintained. This is how Linus et. al. make a living. And that's very rare -- you have to have a project that is (1) already there and valuable and (2) meets some need of a party with deep pockets willing to pay for it.

The model in your head, where you get to have total control over your project and a paycheck from it is a utopia that doesn't exist, sorry. I don't begrudge you for wanting it, I want it too. I just don't see a path to get there.

They don't. Once you've released the code under an open-source license, anyone (including a competitor) can use the code in any way you allowed in the license. The strongest protection they use is trademarks, not copyrights. For example CentOS is exactly basically the same as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but they can't use Red Hat's name or logos. Also Firefox has several forks, but none of them are allowed to use the Firefox name or logos.

Basically, you need to choose your license carefully in order to make sure it reflects what you want to happen with your code. There is a lot of flexibility https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatible...

I'm not sure I can add anything that's not been said already in response to this post, but yeah, you don't make sure somebody else doesn't sell your product better than you. But note this: if it's open source, they have to credit you - and you've got more experience with it than they do.

It's thin gruel if you're operating on the "build a product, sell it to people" model. But you're not talking about building a business on this, are you? So sooner or later, you're going to wake up to the fact that nobody's going to pay you to share your toys, any more than a kid on the playground is going to get any love for wanting to play ball but also get paid rent for the glove he's providing.

I like this model. I like open source because if you get hit by a bus as an indie dev, somebody like me can keep going. I do disagree that people wouldn't use it now (if it is in some state of working) and you could raise money if you want to spend more time/add more features/pay a designer and then it would be up to the community if they wanted those things or not.

Or you could keep it closed and ask for money and I would still consider buying it. I in no way feel disrespected by you saying that you'll make it open once you have hit some level of funding that you feel is appropriate, I can contribute or not at that point.

One anecdote deserves another I guess.