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Comment by yanex | Hacker News Reader

Marta author here.

I agree with you that the open source software has higher level of trust than the proprietary one, but I afraid I just can't maintain Marta steadily for a long time if it was open-sourced (and then forever free). And I doubt the community will do that instead of me. In case if you're interested, I expressed my thoughts about this here [1] earlier.

I do promise, though, that Marta will never collect personal data, display ads or do some other bad things. I just don't see any sense in that, and I'd rather have a good reputation.

[1] https://github.com/marta-file-manager/marta-issues/issues/19...

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Personally, I'm happy to pay for high quality software as I understand someone needs to be paid in order to maintain it, but I like having access to the source in order to reduce risk and maintain more control over my environment.

I think it's possible to release the source and still sell the app, Textual [0] seems like a good example of that. The make my favorite IRC client. Although I'm not sure if the author is that well off or not.

Maybe I'm just an outlier.

[0] https://www.codeux.com/textual/

Sidestepping the actual open-source issue, from a morning's use I think you've done a wonderful job with Marta. I'll be more than happy to pay for it when the time comes.

Actually one doesn't need to trust free software because one has the freedom to inspect and modify the software to make it do what the user wants. Whether users choose to do these things is their choice and besides the point; the freedoms remain.

Trust comes into play when users are denied these freedoms; users have nothing else on which to make an informed decision. Therefore users are left to evaluate promises such as the promises you made. Belief in those promises essentially boils down to uninformed trust. It's no secret that many other proprietors do spy on their users (Microsoft purposefully changed Skype protocol to better allow spying, according to http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-co...). I'm pretty sure Microsoft wants to have a good reputation despite their behavior.

As you said in the post you linked to, "Although this is my current mindset, it can change in the future.". This could apply to the promises you made (or strong convictions you posted about on github.com) as well.

The question of maintaining Marta is another issue I think is misstated in your response here and on github.com: with free software users can maintain software too. They could even choose to hire you to do the job. And they can certainly host their own discussions regardless of Marta's license. The underlying issue has to do with whether users will be able to make the software they run on their computers do what they want the software to do (which is the issue with which I raised my first post on this thread) and thus retain control over their computer.

Is there a reason to not license it under a dual license?

Have the source code open with a non commercial license and also distribute the binaries under a commercial license.

I’m not sure that it will have a significant impact on the revenue since most people would likely opt out and purchase the binary rather than building it on their own.

According to what I know, in case of desktop applications, the revenue drops almost to zero, unless you have a Free and Pro versions. "Free edition" then lacks almost all features that make the product competitive, and it's not really good.

It's reasonable, though, if your potential user base is totally different. For example, IntelliJ IDEA has a Community edition that lacks enterprise frameworks support, but that's not a problem for "single users" because they basically don't do any enterprise. But it looks like it won't work for Marta.

So I'd rather choose the Sublime Text strategy (though I think that Sublime costs too much).

Don’t listen to them. The HN crowd wants everything to be open-source, but likely wouldn’t want to pay for anything even if it was dual licensed. This seems to be a great product, and you deserve to charge for it and keep it closed source.

Most people won't but somebody else will make the builds and then offer those builds. Example: CentOS

See that's why I see CentOS as not necessarily a very good thing. It dents into the idea of making money with open source product.

Though in case of CentOS it probably helps more than it hurts. For RHEL, the product being sold and bought is not the bits, but the support.

This won't work for consumer facing desktop apps though.

Cant you have a license that forbids distributing binaries?

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