quick question: If you are writing a software to start a business around it, would you make that software (or not) open source?

I have in mind something like the Insomnia REST client by @gschier (FOSS) vs Postman (Commercial)

Thanks!

📌

Im so confused by the question.are you asking if we would make the software opensource or not?

Or if we would make the software or not?

Assuming the first: depends

@Codex404 I can't edit the post to clarify... But the question is about what license should the software have and why... 😃

Sorry... My English 🤦‍♂️

@benj it depends

@Codex404 on what?

@svgPhoenix the type of software and the way money will be earned.

@Codex404 if you can't envision exactly how and where your money is coming from shouldnt even start yet.

I think you should let the market dictate exactly what you should do. If you have a well-defined pool of people that you know all their preferences and you know what they're used to paying for the similar solution in market then you can reverse-engineer exactly what product you should be creating and at what price point. If you can make it work with open-source and you plan that all out and you could see all the steps, how it all come together then do it but if you I think you should charge monthly, do that too but you should look before you leap otherwise you will just not have a very definitive aim for your business and you'll end up drowning.

Yeah literally drowning. But it's kind of like saying you're going to do all the tests nobody does the tests the way they'll tell themselves are going to do testing but they don't. Well in marketing nobody does this upfront research either.

no hard and fast rules other than making sure you understand / what kind of problem you can solve and for whom. That's a continual never-ending process by the way.

Regardless of what license you choose, its a good idea to get the app to a release-ready state before you take it open source.

@rant1ng I understand that, but if you want make money by selling your product or by giving support matters for the way to license the product.

How do you want to make money? If it is via the software directly, forget open source. Everyone will use your software while not paying anything.

If the point of your software is supporting or enabling your actual products, you're fine to go. That could be e.g. hardware items which need the software to run or be used.

Selling "support" is a mixed bag because nobody needs service for robust AND intuitive software, so you must either make buggy or unusable software. But it will be difficult to get users to use that shit in the first place because nearly every domain already has such software.

@svgPhoenix it depends, some products are good in a POC stage as well. Im working on something at the moment and about ten devs and two designers cant wait to help...

@Fast-Nop tell that to red hat Xd

@Codex404 Red Hat is an economic dwarf in comparison to Google, Facebook, Amazon or Ebay, and even MS, which alone tells you that the niche isn't big. Besides, there won't be another Red Hat because even that niche is already taken.

@Fast-Nop red hat is one example but there are way more. And do you know who has red hat support? Indeed MS and Google (maybe apple and facebook to?)