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Comment by SLWW | Hacker News Reader

I'm interested in this; though i struggle to understand how you could turn something like this into a product.

There's a lot of logistics in selling this type of thing. Also the BSD license isn't exactly easy to sell something alongside of.

Have you considered open-sourcing and doing the ol' "if you like my work, buy me a coffee"

I know it's extremely communist of me, but I just can't imagine you not stepping on a lot of toes (both legally and otherwise) because of the spirit that OpenBSD was written in.

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> BSD license isn't exactly easy to sell something alongside of

Why's that? There's no reason you cant have a closed-source commercial fork of BSD code. The Playstation 4 OS is a fork of FreeBSD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_4_system_software

I haven't thought this through I have to admit.

I thought that the BSD license was friendly to this kind of stuff.

If I step on people's toes I would ask for forgiveness and try to give them something back, which I think is just the right thing to do.

For example, I read that OpenBSD developers were sad that most of the contributions they got was from individuals more than from companies, when they actually help companies a lot.

Maybe this could be a way to change that situation?

At the end of the day I want to be happy with myself. I don't want to make enemies. Possibly, I would love to keep working on this for a living as I enjoy it more than everything else I did in the past.

This is not a product yet. If it's going to be, it's going to be a very long and hard way before that happens. Why is everyone so concerned about money at this stage?

Personally, I thought that this was a cool thing that some people would like. Maybe I could make a simple living out of it.

Most people comments seem to me like they are assuming that this is going to be a huge success that could make money and are worried that the other devs would be left out with nothing.

Isn't this a bit of a prejudice? And isn't it premature to assume it's going to be a success?

Regarding the "open source, if you like it buy me a coffee" thing, I am not against that. By saying "I'd like to turn this into a product", I don't rule that out. I already mentioned that in another comment.

To me at this stage it's more about making a living out of something I love doing rather than becoming the next big tycoon.

You would get something like a cup of coffee per month. The ecosystem is not really ripe for donation-sustained open source development. GitHub Sponsors feature works a bit better than one time donations. I also like the idea of feature/bug bounties, but I don't know how well they work in practice.

I think the best model if you want to both share the code and make money is to offer commercial version with newest features, and open source a version that's a bit behind. As you publish a new version, you open-source the previous commercial version. This is more of a "source available" model because it actively discourages any community code contributions.

It is still not clear to me how to receive money as founder and maintainer on actual open source project, without resentments from contributors that don't get paid. Doesn't seem fair and has potential to turn into big drama.

This makes a lot of sense. Thank you :-)

Those are complicated matters.

I just have no idea how to do this properly at the moment. I am just hearing people's opinions for now and I'll try and do something that people are generally happy with. On the other hand, it's also true that one cannot please everyone.

To me it's like: "I have done something that I think is cool, let's see what people think about it".

I mentioned that I wanted to do a product out of this and people got emotional, as if it was granted that it's going to be a huge success.

I really wish it was that easy. I think that this is not realistic. It would take a lot of work from a lot of people who need to be paid because they need to pay their own bills to make this into a success. And it still could fail.

I regret having mentioned that I may want to turn this into a product, because it put too much focus on that rather than on the tech that I have developed.

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