Re:Plagiarism of my open source app ChatSecure
by statictype on Tuesday August 14, 2012 @08:02AM
(#4380446)
I've certainly never experienced any support/marketing overload with any of my products.
Presumably because that's your full time job?
Re:Plagiarism of my open source app ChatSecure
by jasonkester on Tuesday August 14, 2012 @08:48AM
(#4380600)
Far from it. Yikes, I've never bought into the valley startup idea, where you spend all your time working on your thing. I spend maybe a dozen hours a month maintaining my little software empire and supporting customers.
There's a reason I promote the lifestyle. Having a little pile of software products paying you a full developer salary in exchange for answering a few emails a week is a pretty good place to be.
I think that's more a rationalization that developers use to convince themselves not to charge for their stuff than a reality. I've certainly never experienced any support/marketing overload with any of my products.
He already has the app in the app store. His support/marketing is where it is already. All he need do is tick a box marked "allow people to send me money" in his app store control panel and he's done. In short, there's no "down" for the app to go. It's already maxed out on the "losing money" front, and doesn't seem to be overburdening him.
On the customer support side, he might actually see that go down too by charging. Here's yesterday's discussion on exactly that:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4376126
This really is a case where there's no downside to charging money. And, seemingly, a very real downside of keeping it open source.