Earlier quoted context omitted.
The “branding of your captcha page is immature” point is a downside unless you consider it not merely self-expression but an intentional motivator for “more mature” (which not infrequently goes hand in hand with “financially able”) people to subscribe to a commercial offering, thus helping keep an open-source project alive and in an honest business, despite competition with a VC-backed behemoth that’s become nearly a…
> unless you consider it not merely self-expression but an intentional motivator for “more mature” (which not infrequently goes hand in hand with “financially able”) people to subscribe to a commercial offering I'm fairly confident in saying that self-expression is the #1 motivator here and the commercial offering was an afterthought. I don't have a marketing degree, but I'm pretty sure that if selling your software…
If that was the goal, this wouldn’t be an OSS project, would it?
When we are talking about FOSS, the goal is to keep the project alive and sustainable without burning out or starving. There are various ways people do it (such as making it your side project in addition to the day job, charging for bug fixes and features, etc.), and this one doesn’t strike me as the worst—making it partly your self-expression creates that extra bit of motivation to keep going, and if it serves as an incentive for people who find it otherwise good (some of which may in fact not mind the default style personally but wouldn’t go for it at their place of employment) to become paid customers then all the better!