I do believe there’s a money problem in open source. If you listen to our shows you know I believe that. It’s just that in open source that problem doesn’t manifest until much later in the process.
It waits until the software has matured, the value has been proven, the community has been built. Then, it sucks the joy out of the developer(s) who gave a gift to the world and turns it in to the worst kind of job. An unpaid job!
The entire post is a worthy read.
We originally open sourced Unmark for one main reason: that it would live on longer than our business did. And that is exactly what happened.
Our business no longer exists but Unmark did for hundreds (if not thousands?) of people running it themselves. And now it is back (invite only as of this writing, but won’t be soon enough) because we brought it back. But someone else could have. And that is the beauty of it.
We will continue to release Unmark as open source for the same reason: that anyone can run it without paying for it for as long as they want regardless if we are around or not.
In fact, unless there were some reason not to, any product I’d build going forward would be done open source. The benefits simply outweigh the drawbacks.
If someone wants to support Unmark they can by subscribing to the hosted version, submitting code fixes or issues via Github, or simply donating.
