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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

I think you're missing an important lesson here: Your product is more valuable than you think.

This guy wouldn't have started selling your thing is it wasn't clear that it's something that people will pay for. Your first reaction when you hear that he's making money off of it shouldn't be how to stop him. It should be "Wow. I could be making money off of this.

My advice:

  - Don't worry about this guy.
  - Put a price on your product
  - Stop giving away the source
  - Improve it until your "competitor" fades away

There's no rule saying that you have to give your work away as open source. And as you've demonstrated, there's also no rule that if you give your work away for free, somebody else won't notice its value and sell it in your place.

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> Stop giving away the source

> There's no rule saying that you have to give your work away as open source.

This is insulting to the author and the whole open source community. You seem to think that people release sources of their software because they think it is worthless or don't know they could make the conscious choice not to release the sources.

Releasing your source code involves a lot more reasoning and motivation than not doing it. Building open source software doesn't mean giving your work away for free, nothing keeps the author from selling his open source application on App Store as a convenience (an example of this practice is Growl). Since we are talking about a mobile application, it is especially easier to sell since most of his users won't even consider building it from source.

You're assuming he cares at all about making money from this app and the only reason he didn't try is because he didn't know it was possible.

His app is free and source code is published on github. Maybe he wants it that way.

From my site:

"This project is 100% free because it is important that all people around the world have unrestricted access to privacy tools. However, developing and supporting this project is hard work and costs real money. Please help support the development of this project!"

Oh, well, then, why don't you charge something for the iOS app?

You can keep the source free and still support your ultimate goal, right?

Having a revenue stream from it would actually be beneficial in keeping it running longer.

»[…] because it is important that all people around the world have unrestricted access to privacy tools.«

That's what the code on github is for?

Not everyone is sophisticated enough to build a mobile app from source, or wealthy enough to pay Apple $99/yr for the privilege of running your own code.

Would you trust proprietary software to encrypt your communications?

Absolutely. Time to start charging for it - you've got something here. Might as well pick the fruits of your labor.

Amazingly, this (and the root comment up top) are actually getting downvoted. I hadn't realized the sentiment among open source developers against making money from their craft was so strong.

But it shouldn't be. We, as developers, shouldn't harbor any ill will toward the OP should he decide to pull the open source version and sell it for profit. We certainly shouldn't advise him against it or recommend an alternative open source license that better guarantees that nobody can make money off this excellent piece of software.

Geeks like us tend to have a natural aversion to making money by selling our work directly, as though it's somehow dirty or wrong in some way that we can't quite articulate.

But we need to get over that.

We have a guy here (patio11) whose job this normally is, but he seems to have taken the morning off so I'll do this in his place:

On behalf of the Internet, I hereby grant you, the developer, permission to charge money for your software.

There, you're good.

The software being proprietary and if money is charged for it are two very different things. This case is about the former.

Let me see if this reaches you up on your high horse:

Not everyone gives a shit about making money from the software they write.

There are many reasons to write software. There are many reasons to not charge for it. Stop presuming to know whats best for the developer.

I know you (probably) mean well but you're missing the point and come off as fairly condescending.

Did you consider the possibility that the author already has a job that pays him extremely well and that the ROI he gets in spending time providing customer support/marketing for a commercial iOS app is actually losing money for him?

You should save the "you are allowed to make money" talk for people who are actually trying to sell software and doing it badly (Because they undervalue the work they created) instead of directing it at someone producing what looks like a labor of love and is not interested in marketing everything he has ever created.

I think that's more a rationalization that developers use to convince themselves not to charge for their stuff than a reality. I've certainly never experienced any support/marketing overload with any of my products.

He already has the app in the app store. His support/marketing is where it is already. All he need do is tick a box marked "allow people to send me money" in his app store control panel and he's done. In short, there's no "down" for the app to go. It's already maxed out on the "losing money" front, and doesn't seem to be overburdening him.

On the customer support side, he might actually see that go down too by charging. Here's yesterday's discussion on exactly that:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4376126

This really is a case where there's no downside to charging money. And, seemingly, a very real downside of keeping it open source.

I've certainly never experienced any support/marketing overload with any of my products.

Presumably because that's your full time job?

Far from it. Yikes, I've never bought into the valley startup idea, where you spend all your time working on your thing. I spend maybe a dozen hours a month maintaining my little software empire and supporting customers.

There's a reason I promote the lifestyle. Having a little pile of software products paying you a full developer salary in exchange for answering a few emails a week is a pretty good place to be.

a very real downside of keeping it open source

What is the downside of keeping it open source?

I think the point that's missed (especially by you) is that proprietary, closed source software is fundamentally more insecure than open source.

As a user of proprietary software, you can't inspect that code for bugs and you can't inspect it for malicious code - you just have to take the vendor's word for it that "it is really secure, honest! And there aren't any backdoors put in by the US government/china/whoever"

I don't know whether chatsecure is any good or would withstand attacks by a nation state, but if I were a security researcher or an aid organisation in the 3rd world, I could look at the source and find out.

It depends on how many copies have been sold, and what the support costs are likely to be. If he's only sold two copies, then it's not going to be worth packaging it up.

Don't forget, it's already packaged up. It's in the app store already.

The author can spend the next ten minutes logging into his apple account and adding a price to it. That's all the effort needed to turn this into a product (besides rewriting the App Store description so that people other than himself can parse what the application actually does).

And then spend the next year supporting it because people have paid 99c and feel that they can now demand support instead of asking for it? No thanks.

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