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Comment by stockkid | Hacker News Reader

Kudos for making it open source.

I wonder if the sales will increase if you make source code unavailable. The reason is that, as you said, it is very easy for people to just run unpacked extensions in dev mode.

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I know of a very popular Mac desktop app whose sales dropped by 90% overnight when the author made it open source (but still asked users to pay). The reason I know this is that I was thinking of open sourcing my file manager [1]. I did some research, found the aforementioned Mac app and got in touch with the author who told me how open sourcing had affected sales. It would have made my project unsustainable, so I decided against open source. I ended up choosing a different business strategy [2].

1: https://fman.io 2: https://fman.io/blog/fmans-business-strategy/

Your app looks so much like Sublime Text that it could just follow the same model: paid closed source app + free open source plugins on a repository maintained by you (like Package Control). As far as I know, Sublime Text is doing pretty well.

I use Sublime from time to time and never had to pay for the packages. As far as I am aware of it Sublime has the same business model as WinRAR. Totally free with an annoying popup asking for you to get a license.

Yes, that's pretty much the plan.

I've definitely been curious as to how much the sales would change if I had made it closed sourced.

However I'm happy to take the loss in sales to enable technical enough users to be able to mess with the source code & (hopefully) send some code back to the repo ;)

May not much differences I think. Chrome warns you on each startup for non-store extensions. It's annoying. If they do one more steps, there're some NODEJS tools for them also. So that I think this extension really needs to focus on newbies.

Chrome removed the ability to install third party extensions. You have to install them through the Chrome store, even if you have the source.

It's really stupid. So many of the extensions I use have annoying bugs that I'd totally fix if I was allowed.

You can still do it, you just have to jump through some more hoops. You have to be able to if you think about it, otherwise you couldn't develop an extension

Edit: having done a bit of reading, the above may be incorrect now

Well if I remember correctly, they make it really annoying. Like you can only have one developer extension at a time, and you need to set it up again every time you restart chrome. I doubt most people will bother.

Just did some testing. Chrome stable 54.0.2840.59 on linux. Put on OP's extension from source and an extension of my own that was already in there. No issues. Then I packed both of them and installed them both packed, again no issues.

You're not crazy though, the internet seems to agree that there was an issue.

I believe the restrictions only apply to Windows and Mac builds not Linux.

https://blog.chromium.org/2015/05/continuing-to-protect-chro...

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