| Author here, commenting on the "I am not sure how I feel about OSS projects getting some attention and then closing source" part of your message. I think that sounds sketchy to some people, but hear me out: 1. I couldn't stand using Evernote anymore, I couldn't find a Markdown-based alternative that I really liked, I thought I would make one for myself. 2. After the app was "done", at least enough for it to be usable for me, I released it on GitHub, essentially because open-source is my default, and shared it on the internet. 3. The app got a bit of traction and I thought I would continue working on it maybe for a bit longer. 4. At some point months of my time had been put into it, and many more months were needed before the app could start to generate some revenue (I'm ~18 months in now, and no revenue yet), so I couldn't justify releasing all the code anymore, but I still wanted to improve the app. At this point in the story what would you do? I saw the following options: 1. Abandon Notable and move onto other projects. But why would I do that? I like working on it, and people seem to like it. 2. Rename Notable into something else and make another repo. I think this would have been considered the "fairer" option for some people here, but if you think about it it doesn't really make sense: Notable-open would still receive no further open-source commits, I would have to ask all my existing users to move to another app for some reason (breaking automatic updates), and frankly I would even need to find a new name, which I had made a logo for, bought the "notable.md" domain and registered a bunch of online accounts with that name already. 3. Releasing the code with a more restrictive license, but I don't really believe in licenses, like a license to me is not a law of nature that fundamentally forbids people from copying the entire app, making a few tweaks, and selling a competing product out of that, it just means that if I'm convinced somebody has done that, and there are laws in his/her country, and if I sue him/her, then probably I will win. For a project that has net me a negative income essentially in opportunity cost, so far at least, why would I go for that trouble? 4. The path that I ended up taking. Do you people see any other options? Do you have any strong arguments for why I should have taken another path? Slight rant: I'd be much more impressed if the people strongly criticizing how I spent my time, largely solely to the benefit of Notable's users and the open-source community as a whole (almost all core components of the app are standalone libraries I'm open-sourcing fully), had taken the path they are advocating for themselves. |