Sure, you can have a for-pay open source app, but if it's a consumer product (as opposed to, say, some B2B thing with special licensing), then it isn't going anywhere as a business. Many people will just download the code and compile it instead of paying you (or find someone else who packaged it up). That's why open source has been more successful with software-as-service.

  > but if it's a consumer product...then it isn't going anywhere as a business

why?

Do you have an example of a successful open source consumer product business?

Just off the top of my head,

Aseprite: https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite Onivim: https://v2.onivim.io/ Ardour: https://ardour.org/

Of course, I don't know how successful each of those projects are, but they seem to be successful enough to continue development.

First one is not an open source and the other two don't appear to be businesses.

ONLYOFFICE (not yelling, that's how they stylize it) and Nextcloud

PostgreSQL?

It's not a consumer product.

I’ve been selling open source software as my full time job for like 7 years now

??? Maybe if your userbase is tiny. As soon as it reaches even a 100-200 people someone will compile the source and distribute it for free or copy and resell it cheaper. they sure as heck aren’t orthogonal concepts in practice.

maybe im way out there but...

if you live/sell in a country that respects software copyright/license, then you can sue them or get a cease and desist for using it against your license (say prohibiting commercial derivative or violating your copyright without authorization)

and your software, if popular or lucrative, its going to get ripped off anyways like in the real app store (just look at the many clones of many apps), or just plain pirated like the myriad apps (photoshop, word et all) have since basically forever

am i way off-base?

> if you live/sell in a country that respects software copyright/license, then you can sue them or get a cease and desist for using it against your license (say prohibiting commercial derivative or violating your copyright without authorization)

Prohibition of derivative makes your software not open source

But you can use trademark, instead of copyright to prevent someone else to sell copies of your app. Sort of what Red hat does but that doesn't prevent clones with a different name to pop up.

  > Prohibition of derivative makes your software not open source

hmmm right, maybe my understanding was a little different, i was assuming "if you pay me, ill give you the source if you ask for it" would make it "open source" but that would be incorrect ...