Comment by gameswithgo
5 years ago
I would advise people who decide to embark on large, hard projects like this to stop making them free. Make the source open if you want, but charge money. Either for the product, or for support requests, something. This not only filters out entitled assholes, but it gets you money, money that you can maybe use to pay people to help, or at least to buy a beer.
This is an unfortunate conclusion that I also arrived at after much consideration. I have a proposed dream project in front of me that would take at least 2000 hours to reach MVP. Do I just give it away for free on GitHub under MIT? I spent over a decade honing the skills that allow me to even engage with such a difficult objective. Why should I just give it all away unfettered? What alternative approaches exist in which I share these wonderful new ideas openly and also somehow reap the benefits?
I feel that for certain projects like vendor API integration libraries, opening up the source for all to use freely is the best path. But for others, where years of intellectual property and personal development exist predominantly within the code itself... I think I want to keep this kind of code to myself for now.