Does everything have to have a monetization strategy?

As a user of an app, its always a fair question to ask.

"Free" usually means you are the product.

"Open Source" means you are not though.

No, capital F Free (as in freedom ) usually does not mean that. Closed source and gratis often do.

You're not "the product" for the Apache web server or the Linux kernel...

I don't want to be the "product" of this free app.

It has an MIT license on GitHub

https://github.com/milanvarady/Applite

I am not a license expert, but doesn't MIT mean we can build upon it with proprietary changes and then sell it as proprietary software?

Yes.

Yes. You can also sell the project as-is with zero changes if you want. The only thing you have to be wary of is trademarks, which normally aren't covered under standard OSS licenses.

This being HN, I can't tell if this comment is a joke or not.

Nothing. It's a passion project of mine. I accept donations to cover the Apple Developer Program fees.

There would be a lot of value in whitelist and audit features for IT to manage their risk when letting developers install applications themselves (if not also a binary repository).

One model (and possible partner) here is Sonatype, with a growth path into binary repositories for development (Swift packages, cocoa pods et al).

I realize you might not want the burden, but you might partner with someone or some company. (And I would encourage others to collaborate before forking.)

I love the guy's actual answer. It's always interesting to see this be a question. What is yum's monetization strategy? What is apt's? Does any package manager have a monetization strategy? If anything, they might be components to a larger distro that itself sells enterprise support packages, but the software itself is rarely if ever monetized. Homebrew is BSD-licensed and currently run by a nonprofit. The original developer never tried to make it into a product and "monetized" by parlaying the experience he gained doing it into highly paid engineering jobs in spite of having no formal training in computer science or software development, and eventually started his own company when he got tired of working for Apple.