[molmalo]

The problem arises when you are a dev trying put food on the table.

It's easy to talk about how other people's work should be given for free when you have a source of income every month, and your basic needs are covered.

But if the author is trying to live of his work, as it's the case here, it's a decision that should be respected.

And Yes, you can disagree with him, and in that case, you can vote with your wallet by not buying it and using any other app.

[GekkePrutser]

Well in this case he offers the binary app for free anyway (he only asks for voluntary contributions), so I don't really see how making it closed-source would affect this.

I often support open-source projects financially and I would be a lot less likely to support this now that it's not. It's not just a matter of giving anything for free. It's about continity: That someone else can carry on with the app (and the data I've put in it!) if he decides to give up on it.

But like I said I don't like this particular app anyway for the reasons I mentioned so I don't use it. It would however be a big detractor for me when looking for a new app.

Especially this thing would put me off: "I've decided to figure out how to make it sustainable first before figuring out potentially how to license it, in order to make this less risky for me."

So in other words, there will be monetisation coming later, but no indication on what kind of price or payment model (think monthly, lifetime etc) he will go for. This would be a big uncertainty for me if I were to consider spending time to put my data into this thing. Who knows if I'll find the upcoming price acceptable. This and the continuity thing would make it a non-starter for me, and I assume many others too. Don't forget the market of notetaking apps is very crowded.

[fabiospampinato]

> Well in this case he offers the binary app for free anyway (he only asks for voluntary contributions), so I don't really see how making it closed-source would affect this.

Building the thing that one can sell takes time you know.

> I often support open-source projects financially and I would be a lot less likely to support this now that it's not.

Do you think honestly that you would spend more on software if everything you depend on was closed source or less? It's not a matter of being greedy, it's just human nature, if one can get something for free it's way less likely that one's going to pay for it, or pay fairly for it.

> It's about continity: That someone else can carry on with the app (and the data I've put in it!) if he decides to give up on it.

I'm not sure I agree with that, if I decide to abandon Notable because it doesn't make financial sense to me, how do you think is going to continue its development? Like if something is not financially sustainable it's probably dead int he first place.

Plus this argument for an app like Notable where notes are written in Markdown and they really truly _are_ the database of the app doesn't make a lot of sense, I don't think you can get less "no vendor lock-in" than this.

> So in other words, there will be monetisation coming later, but no indication on what kind of price or payment model (think monthly, lifetime etc) he will go for.

I haven't figured out the pricing yet, it's probably going to be something around 5 bucks a month. Lifetime licenses are unsustainable, like how much do you think you should pay Notable for hosting all your notes and attachments forever?

[GekkePrutser]

> Building the thing that one can sell takes time you know.

I know, but open-source does not mean free (as in beer), and closed-source does not mean paid. They are essentially unrelated things. You can publish the source but not license it.

> I'm not sure I agree with that, if I decide to abandon Notable because it doesn't make financial sense to me, how do you think is going to continue its development? Like if something is not financially sustainable it's probably dead int he first place.

This disregards the many great free apps that are around :)

But anyway this point came from having the bad experinece of having all my notes in a system that pretty much got abandoned, and it really helped that it was open source to export my notes from its XML format. That's the main reason for that point from my side.

> I haven't figured out the pricing yet, it's probably going to be something around 5 bucks a month. Lifetime licenses are unsustainable, like how much do you think you should pay Notable for hosting all your notes and attachments forever?

Ah, like I said I didn't use the app but I wouldn't really want a note system that uses third-party servers anyway. I'd want to self-host it. With Tomboy I used to just sync its files with OwnCloud (because the built-in sync server was not great).

However that pricing comes very close to other commercial options that are highly regarded, like EverNote (7 euro/month) or OneNote (you can get OneNote on a 5 euro per month O365 subscription that also includes email hosting and 1TB OneDrive). The 'hosted' notetaking market is very competitive. I'm not looking for a hosted option myself but I do know the market (and I use OneNote in work as it's the only thing I'm allowed to use there :( )

[fabiospampinato]

> I know, but open-source does not mean free (as in beer), and closed-source does not mean paid. They are essentially unrelated things. You can publish the source but not license it.

And what has that to do with your comment about not seeing the point of closing the source when the app is still free? I've answered why releasing the code with a stricter license (or no license) wasn't a viable strategy for me in a reply to the first comment in this HN posting.

> This disregards the many great free apps that are around :)

Which apps have at least the equivalent of somebody working full-time on them for free? And how long do you think that can go on?

> Ah, like I said I didn't use the app but I wouldn't use a note system that uses third-party servers anyway. I'd want to self-host it.

Of course you do, what do you think a fair pricing for that would be then?

> However that pricing comes very close to other commercial options that are highly regarded, like EverNote (7 euro/month) or OneNote (you can get OneNote on a 5 euro per month O365 subscription that also includes email hosting and 1TB OneDrive).

I wouldn't say Evernote is highly regarded, but anyway it's not always about finding the cheapest thing out there, for example I want to write my notes with Markdown, it doesn't matter to me if Evernote or OneNote are free if I can't do that with those apps.

[GekkePrutser]

Hey I don't want to keep discussing as it starts to feel like an argument and that was never my intention :)

But I'd pay 20-40 euro for a good notetaking app with self-host capability. Maybe 50 if it's really good.

[fabiospampinato]

I agree the discussion in starting to get annoying.

Let me just mention that with that amount of money I can buy about 2~5 fresh pizzas, if a good note-taking app provides about the same value to you maybe you don't even need one.