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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

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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