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Comment by aggronn | Hacker News Reader

just want to point out: if the reason for holding it back is almost entirely because she wants to get paid for it, she should actually explain how open sourcing it excludes her from income. after reading it, it sounded like she was concerned about the sunk cost--which would be irrational.

so I'm curious, how is she earning income from it? it does she know she'll find people to licence it?

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After reading the article, I got the impression that getting it ready for release would be a non-trivial amount of work, and it is that work she wants to be paid for, not the work done so far.

Because, well, making it available for free means that fewer people will be compelled to buy it?

and if no one is compelled to buy it to begin with? that's what I'm asking. I don't think we can just assume that someone would buy it.

Sure, we can't, but if you open source it, you'll make strictly less money than if you hadn't (because if nobody was going to buy it, they aren't going to pay you money if you open source it anyway).

This is too simplified, as you can have other monetization models, but usually you don't open-source things if you want to charge for them.

> Sure, we can't, but if you open source it, you'll make strictly less money than if you hadn't (because if nobody was going to buy it, they aren't going to pay you money if you open source it anyway).

That isnt correct, a lot of people buy open source software specifically because it is open source.

And statistically, they're absolutely dwarfed by the money flowing to proprietary applications.

It's possible to sell open source software, but it is very, very tricky to get right.

You might make more money by open sourcing: if, for example, it's not currently in a state to have anyone be willing to purchase it.

Sure, that's the "other monetization model" I mentioned. In general, though, if money is the only thing you went to get from something, open sourcing it isn't the best way to do it.

Not entirely true. You can monetize around the open source software you built but this largely depends on what you built. In this case, she is expecting to raise 30k for a feed reader, when there are already open sourced readers with a similar functionality(?).

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