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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. so I'm curious, how is she earning income from it? it does she know she'll find people to licence it?
When I open sourced my own RSS reader[1] some of the "non-monetary currencies" I received:
* Several (non-robot) recruitment emails from well-known companies doing Ruby
* Additional development time from strangers to fix things I wasn't interested in
doing (i18n, performance improvements)
* Additional testing time to iron out all the bugs
* 50-100 "qualified followers" (i.e. other developers/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/conference talks
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. so I'm curious, how is she earning income from it? it does she know she'll find people to licence it?
Because, well, making it available for free means that fewer people will be compelled to buy it?
"why should I compromise my own ability to license this and make some money from it?" It's the same reasons you don't do slaves anymore. This guy needs to figure out better business models because the ones she's trying to do are obsoleted.
Also it'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.
If you really want to keep building Fred, you could use something like IgnitionDeck ( http://ignitiondeck.com ) to raise money over a longer duration. We've had a lot of people come to us after successful and non-successful Kickstarters in order to keep the dream alive. Edit: I get it, blatant self-promotion. Look through my history and you'll see I rarely mention my company, and when I do, it's appropriate. In this…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because, well, making it available for free means that fewer people will be compelled to buy it?
and if no one is compelled to buy it to begin with? that's what I'm asking. I don't think we can just assume that someone would buy it.
This is too simplified, as you can have other monetization models, but usually you don't open-source things if you want to charge for them.
Summary: "I might want to make money out of this, so... nope."
Even if the software represents a significant investment, it's frequently easier to create wealth than it is to capture the value of that wealth. One big realization of the open source movement was that even if you can't capture the value of your software by selling it under proprietary terms, you can still derive value from it via indirect reciprocity by releasing it under a FOSS license.
If you really want to keep building Fred, you could use something like IgnitionDeck ( http://ignitiondeck.com ) to raise money over a longer duration. We've had a lot of people come to us after successful and non-successful Kickstarters in order to keep the dream alive. Edit: I get it, blatant self-promotion. Look through my history and you'll see I rarely mention my company, and when I do, it's appropriate. In this…
I downvoted you - it is not the self-promotion, but rather the fact that except for mentioning "Fred", this whole comment reads like an auto-generated message. For example, an ancedote about a similar open source project that failed on kickstarter and found success on IgnitionDeck would probably be better received.
Ironically, I avoided a lengthier comment because I worried it would seem fake.
"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'll make them rewrite it all from scratch if they are in need of this functionality." I don't believe this person understands empathy. I realize if you want your project to flourish as an op…
bzzzt! Wrong!
Releasing stuff that is "close enough" as a product and have it succeed is wasting other people's lives as they struggle to fix your ball of mud and make it work better over time.
Better to wait and not waste other people's time.