It's better for your mental health to instead think "well, at least my loyal, paying customers who believed in me have a path".

True, that's a good counter point. I'll take it :)

Perhaps another option would be to give paying customers an invitation to a private git repo

Maybe the pricing is off?

There's lots of things I'd use at $n but wouldn't use at $10n

And the corollary of this - if open source didn't exist, the result wouldn't be me paying for lots more products - it would be using lots less products.

Certainly - the advent of paywalls has meant that I mainly don't read those sources. Even the more affordable ones come with a mental tax of deciding to subscribe/cancel, remembering to renew/cancel etc...

The first time I've heard of it is today so I can't really have ever given them money to begin with.

But I'd be curious to see the source once it's released, for sure.

Open source code is inherently more dependable than proprietary code, in that if the maintainer quits and this tool is crucial for your business, if it's open source you can maintain it yourself (or if it's used by multiple parties, they can pool together to keep maintaining it)

I myself am not interested on any proprietary offerings at this point; this has no relation to any qualities of the proprietary product. It could be awesome for all I know

I think there’s a lot of people that’ll happily install it if it’s open source, and then do absolutely nothing with it. The same people wouldn’t pay $20/month for the same privilege.

The people to whom it is valuable are already paying.