[carlosjobim]

No. Do not open source it. Respect yourself and the work you have accomplished. If you have no interest of making a business from your code, you can give away the finished software for free. Then you can postpone the decision if you want to make it a source of income later in the future.

There are no benefits at all for you by making the code open source. There are no benefits for users either. The only people who benefit are huge corporations and a few open source fanatics who wouldn't even give you a glass of water if you asked for it.

If you want to benefit other people with your code and make a living from it, sell the software for an honest price. That way you attract quality users and are fairly compensated for your work.

[ethan_smith]

Accessibility tools often thrive as open source precisely because they can be adapted to diverse needs, audited for security, and maintained by communities when individual developers move on.

[carlosjobim]

I see software thrive much better when it's sold for a fair price by a solo developer or small shop. Boutique software is great for users and great for the programmers. And if the OP has no monetary interest, he/she could give away the software for free while keeping the source code for themselves.

[owebmaster]

You are getting downvoted but I want to reinforce this: open source is a tough free work, it is easy to get oneself burnout for nothing and nobody will care, not even the people benefiting the most from your code.

[blindprogrammer]

Yes, as I read HN and Reddit, I’m seeing all the big corporations acting like vultures. The problem is, as these corporations monopolize the market—either by buying out or rendering smaller independent companies and developers obsolete—and as most of the brilliant programmers end up working for the same 3–4 tech giants, I’d be forced to either:

Allow these vultures to steal my code, lock it behind a paywall, and then compete with me using my own work; or Make my code GPLv3 to effectively block them and their subsidiaries from touching it.

In that case, I and other independent developers would retain control and be the ones improving the code—unless, of course, the AI-bros are allowed to steal with impunity, which would make this whole conversation pointless.

[carlosjobim]

If you make the code publicly accessible you have no guarantees that people and corporations won't take that code. How about inviting the right people to work with you on the closed source code if they show any interest to help?