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Comment by martingxx | Hacker News Reader

I interpret this as "I don't want to collaborate with you people yet - I want this all for myself because I think I can make more money that way. But in case I fail, I'll change my mind and hey let's work together!"

No thanks.

GNU GPL is an excellent choice for a license for a commercial product if you do it right. It fosters collaboration and community from the start. Look around at the most successful companies whose major products are open source, especially the GPL ones. Note that none of them started off refusing reciprocal collaboration with potential contributors.

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You might be right in part: it's his product and his business and I'm not sure he means for the community to contribute to his wealth (like you say "I don't want to collaborate [yet]" is probably more or less accurate). However the "I'll change my mind and hey let's work together" part I think is wrong.

He provides the source for people to see in the first place. Assuming there are no patents involved, that makes anyone free to re-implement ideas there, which is a risk for him, but nice for everyone who wants to see source code of stuff they use (I do). Then, when it turns out he no longer needs the product, it's free for everyone. If people don't find it worth the money but do want to use it and hack on it, they're free to do so, with or without him. So he's not asking to work together or for help in later years, he's giving the opportunity to use it after he stopped doing so himself.

Re-implementing "independently" once you have seen the source code can be legally problematic. (see https://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/faq/faq.html#faq3_2 ) for an example.

No longer needing the product kind of means that it's failed. In which case, why would it suddenly be valuable to others with a simple change of license?

It's more likely to succeed in the first place by fostering collaboration from the start. This is how successful open source projects operate. It's all about community, mutual respect, and bi-directional sharing.

Having the source available but not open (yet) strikes me as a cynical attempt to appear open while retaining control of other peoples freedoms, and I for one would never work with such a project. I'd probably rather use a completely closed product with no source available; at least you're getting something that's not pretending to be more open than it really is.

Actually the reason I posted source was not because I wanted collaboration but due to fears that it was somehow phoning home with your valuable source code. I wanted resolve this issue by allowing anyone to vet the source code before rolling it out.

It's not about wanting to appear open and deceive anyone as its not an open source project. I'm open to change this in the future though if circumstances change.

Actually it's nothing to do with collaboration. The source is fair source because I want you to be able to check that there are no phone home methods sending me your source code.

The GPL portion is there to ensure that if someone does use this and I loose interest or die at a specified time they can continue to use it as they see fit.

I'm not trying to deceive anyone through these decisions.

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