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Comment by rcfox | Hacker News Reader

Free and open source software is awesome. However, if you spend all of your time build great tools that you give away for free, then how are you supposed to pay your rent and eat?

I know, there are plenty of open source projects that make money, and plenty of open source projects that thrive despite not making money. None of those are MVPs, like this project is. I doubt anyone who started on those projects was depending on them to make a living right away.

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I think what he's saying is that the tools could be sold with a model similar to GitHub's -- the tools would be free to use for open source projects, but you'd have to pay to use them for your closed source projects. The idea is that open source software could benefit from having better tools to work with, while the software company still turns a profit off of commercial users.

How does one make sure that their code isn't used in a closed source project though? What's to stop them from using it if no outsider will see their code?

You can't, if the code is hosted separately from the tool.

The solution is to provide the tool and the hosting together. For example, GitHub or Bitbucket could acquire this service and add it to their offerings, and it would fit right in with their existing business model.

I think you're getting even further away from open source.

If this tool could connect to a remote repo (like the GitHub repo) and operate on the changelog, then you'd be fine. No one would be able to use it privately without publicly exposing their repo.

Perhaps then you could charge a fee to get an ssh key to add to you authorized_keys file, which would allow for private use.

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