"Just open-source it" is not realistic

Regarding the money thing, remember there are other currencies than dollars.<p>When I open sourced my own RSS reader[1] some of the &quot;non-monetary currencies&quot; I received:<p><pre><code> * Several (non-robot) recruitment emails from well-known companies doing Ruby * Additional development time from strangers to fix things I wasn&#x27;t interested in doing (i18n, performance improvements) * Additional testing time to iron out all the bugs * 50-100 &quot;qualified followers&quot; (i.e. other developers&#x2F;designers) on Twitter, many thanking me for creating the project - increasing my network reach * Five people have sent me messages that their merged pull requests were there first open source contributions - that feels really cool * Links from two of my favorite blogs - OneThingWell and The Changelog * Being referenced in a Ruby book written by a community leader * Socially-validated (1.8k+ stars) open source project that I can forever point to * Material for future blog posts, user group&#x2F;conference talks </code></pre> Not all of these have the same value to each person - but for me, they were worth the trade-off. Could I have charged for the software instead? Probably, but I have a day job that pays me well and I enjoy. I wrote the software because I wanted it to exist (one of my favorite things about being a developer) and any extra benefits are just icing on the cake.<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/swanson/stringer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;swanson&#x2F;stringer</a>

If you really want to keep building Fred, you could use something like IgnitionDeck (<a href="http://ignitiondeck.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ignitiondeck.com</a>) to raise money over a longer duration.<p>We&#x27;ve had a lot of people come to us after successful and non-successful Kickstarters in order to keep the dream alive.<p>Edit: I get it, blatant self-promotion. Look through my history and you&#x27;ll see I rarely mention my company, and when I do, it&#x27;s appropriate. In this case, I&#x27;m trying to help.

Summary: &quot;I might want to make money out of this, so... nope.&quot;

At my company we&#x27;ve open sourced a ruby gem for an elastic search client but kept the rails integration closed for some of the same reasons. I just don&#x27;t have time to write a version that runs with vanilla rails. Our gem relies on a bunch of conventions and libs that are not standard for a rails app. Sure we could extract it, but we would have to rewrite parts that depend on other tools. Sure they could be open sourced as well, but we&#x27;ve hardly got the time to do that. The reality is that most oss projects are small and are maintained by one person with occasional patches from others. Without that one person most die.

just want to point out: if the reason for holding it back is almost entirely because she wants to get paid for it, she should actually explain how open sourcing it excludes her from income. after reading it, it sounded like she was concerned about the sunk cost--which would be irrational.<p>so I&#x27;m curious, how is she earning income from it? it does she know she&#x27;ll find people to licence it?

&quot;I might make myself look a bit messy by releasing this. I also imagine that some other people might have to put in some amount of work (much less than the work I put into writing this in the first place) to get this to work, so I&#x27;ll make them rewrite it all from scratch if they are in need of this functionality.&quot; I don&#x27;t believe this person understands empathy.<p>I realize if you want your project to flourish as an open source project, you need to make it palatable. However, a tarball of shit is better than NOTHING. This person isn&#x27;t even deluding themselves by saying they&#x27;ll &quot;get around to open sourcing it.&quot; You won&#x27;t do the world a disservice by releasing working code. Seriously, just come out and be honest and say &quot;I don&#x27;t want to open source it because I don&#x27;t wanna.&quot;

Not wanting to proselytize on a failure but presumably 15 minutes of graphic design input on the video thumbnail would have helped the Kickstarter pitch?

I just don&#x27;t think that there are enough developers yearning for yet-another-feed-reader, and one written in C++ of all things, to really support an open source project for it.<p>Much less one that is being held hostage by it&#x27;s author.

I can&#x27;t just help thinking that if this software was truly both non-trivial and useful that it would be relatively easy to pick up $30k &quot;after&quot; open sourcing it via consulting or customization work.

Can anyone explain&#x2F;summarize what this is? I gather it was&#x2F;is feed reader, but I can&#x27;t find much more and she (?) is very vague. Or I don&#x27;t know how to navigate her blog.

Your project doesn&#x27;t have to be perfect or complete when you open source it. You just have to set your version number correctly somewhere between v0.0.0 - v1.0. Developers will still find it useful while they know it&#x27;s not yet 1.0.

Tell that to Acquia.

In other words, capitalism ruins it for the rest of us....

I&#x27;ve found open source so liberating that I couldn&#x27;t even consider closing down my source ever! For a while, for me, it&#x27;s been morally wrong to close source code or rely on sources that&#x27;s not within your reach.<p>&quot;why should I compromise my own ability to license this and make some money from it?&quot; It&#x27;s the same reasons you don&#x27;t do slaves anymore. This guy needs to figure out better business models because the ones she&#x27;s trying to do are obsoleted.<p>Also it&#x27;s not wonder that her Kickstarter failed, it sucked very hard. Big TL;DR with no marketting material that would motivate people to pick on it. Most of people who saw that thing probably had no idea what they could do with her project.