Hacker News Reader

To be perfectly honest, if you open sourced it but just put up the source to download (and not precompiled binaries for OS X), you'd probably sell close to as many copies as you do now.

Although it is also possible that someone would compile the source and put a binary on the Internet for free, undercutting sales.

View on HN

Yeah I can see this going both ways, really. (That is, similar sales volume or drastically reduced sales volume.)

And, as I say, I think there's a real benefit to taking something like this and opening it up, I'm just not sure I'm willing to risk it - for now - especially since I'm already competing against _one_ free alternative.

Wouldn't it be possible to add a clause prohibiting distribution of binaries?

Then it wouldn't really be open source anymore. But you could stop people from offering it under your trademarked name (like the way Red Hat does it).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com