[pugio]

What about a commercial source but fully source-available product?

I'm currently building an app I hope will appeal to the HN crowd, and I was planning on making the full source available to all customers - this would be billed as a feature of the product.

I can't count the number of times I was happily using a closed source product only to find a bug or missing feature that I really wished I could just make a small tweak to add/fix. I didn't need the app to be open source or anything, I just wanted to be able to see what was running and make a small change myself. For many of these situations I would happily commit the patch back to the commercial product, just so that my experience would be nicer.

I want to be able to charge for and sell my app, but I would like all my users to be able to see exactly what's running under the hood, and be able to tweak and modify it for their own personal use. (I also plan on including an extensive public extension API. Extensions can also be open source of course.)

To me this seems like a fairly good sweet spot, as I really do need to charge to be able to support the development. I could even see committing to always keeping the source available to users, or to open source it if I ever stop commercial development of the product. I hope this appeals to folks here, because I can't see a better model that will support a single developer as I go.

[whartung]

It's one thing to be able to see what's going on under the hood. It's another being able to change what's going on under the hood. And it's a third thing not having that change you just made get stomped on, or interfere with the next great release of the product.

Even potentially more difficult is getting your change accepted by the software vendor to where it's now incorporated in to the production product.

I mean, this is nothing new, this happens with open source projects all the time, but it can be a difference in scope depending on the level that your company actually relies on some product for their operations.

[galaxyLogic]

What about making the basic product free but charging a fee for modifications?

[OkayPhysicist]

I've played a few video games with this model: the source being available is a help to modders and the like, while still maintaining the game's commercial status. The best example I can think of is Barotrauma, where just a couple months ago there was a release that subtly broke networking on Macs. Quick code change fixed it so that my Apple-locked friends could play until the company got around to fixing it. Minecraft falls into the sorta-defacto version of this, where they distribute the necessary mappings to decompile the game for modding purposes.

Personally I think it should be the default distribution model for software. If I'm relying on a piece of software, especially one I paid for, doubly-especially if it's running on my machine, I should have the right to modify it and probably to distribute my modifications.

[ksec]

Which is like the Unreal Engine Model. Unfortunately this "Share Source" model hasn't caught on and lacks a widely accepted license.

I hope I am wrong and do wish you to succeed. But Not Strictly Open Source doesn't appeal much to HN crowd.

[pythonaut_16]

> But Not Strictly Open Source doesn't appeal much to HN crowd

I don't think this is true. "Open Source" But Not Really is what gets criticized here, such as Elasticsearch's new license.

Things that want to benefit from calling themselves open source while restricting user freedoms.

Source available on the other hand is exactly what it claims to be. It's more open than strictly closed source and less free than fully open source.

[mamcx]

That is how things are in the Delphi world.