You seem to forgot that most independent developers don't make money, period. The fact that your app is open source or not is only marginally related to the fact that it earns you a living. Thousands upon thousands developed applications for desktop or mobile or whatever and simply cant' make end meet. Believing that because your app has a sticker price on it will make you money is an illusion.

I hire some dev interns every year. For the past 5 or 6 years, they all were using Sublime Text as their main editor. And none of them paid it, they simply clicked the nagging dialog away. To all of them I had to explain that it would be fairer either to use a free alternative like Atom or VSCode, or pay the fee (or learn to use a real editor like Vim or Emacs :). People go through incredible pains not to pay, even if your program isn't free. Even if they're programmers, and spend all day using your program.

No, I didn't forget or ignore the fact that a lot of software products fail to make money. I went through several failed software product attempts before building one that stuck, and it's part of the process of getting to know what one's forte is, as well as getting good at running a software company and making money from it.

But, I would seriously argue the proposition that open sourcing one's software does not harm your ability to make money from it. Exhibit A is how often you see a mass of "They want money ? We're switching/forking !!!" type of posts and comments whenever the inevitable "we need to start making money from this project" point hits with an open source project.

As for your example, you're kind of making my point for me. ;-) It's a serious issue, and one that I'm trying to make as much as possible: as software developers, we're seriously harming our own economic well-being as a group by being overly-altruistic and conditioning (what would normally be paying) customers into thinking that our work is without value. It doesn't matter what the reality is, but free=no value in the eyes of consumers.

Any software I have used and found to be a tool I've relied on, I have purchased a licence for at some point in time. Granted this is when I've been comfortable financially. If it comes down to eating or paying for a software license is obvious. But to keep being a tight ass after you're more than able is just crappy. Especially since as a dev you should be able to relate to those dedicated to their craft & realize they too could be struggling financially. I do find smaller orgs more enticing than say a Photoshop license as an example, of the pricing is high for using on occasions. That said being a solely design or front end type that's something you'd use and rely on to make money on. It's really that case (for me at least) if it's used for profit it should be profitable for the creators. However I've also been a musician too who believes strongly on the opposite. Music should be free to individuals and paid for up corporations. The same model is great for open source like redhat (centos) or Magento that offer enterprise license that mean dedicated support. My point being as an individual it's hard to justify at times, but for organizations it should be obvious to licensed.

Having paid for sublime and PHP storm, both have vim modes. But I prefer nano (yes I'm one of those lol ;-) )

Sure. But the original statement was that it does not work. eg 0% success

Whereas clearly it can, as there are the occasional success stories. So, it's more than 0%. Maybe not a high percentage yet though. ;)

Yes, but that statement was followed by more details as to exactly what I meant. A model that only works for a small percentage of people does not work.

My point is that you can't start a business based upon some vague hope that someday, somehow, someone will possibly choose to donate money to you. You need a reliable stream of income, and one that will keep coming long after the shine has worn off the original product and now you're slogging through complicated maintenance and upgrades.

You want to know why the JS ecosystem keeps suffering from the "shiny penny" problem ? This is one of the reasons.

>>My point is that you can't start a business based upon some vague hope that someday, somehow, someone will possibly choose to donate money to you. You need a reliable stream of income, and one that will keep coming long after the shine has worn off the original product and now you're slogging through complicated maintenance and upgrades

What part of that doesn't apply equally proprietary software too?

I see the biggest difference being that with commercial software you know when to stop and move on to something else.

Ahhh. Yeah, now I understand what you mean.

For an already successful OSS project though, it might be a way to turn that into an ongoing income stream to then continue improving the software.