It's not open source yet.

You're not the only one my friend. This is my personal opinion: If your application's value is dependent on it's it's ability to protect its source code, then it's not actually a valuable product. What I mean to say is, how does "protecting" your source code generate or hold on to revenue? Because its perceived as something you can sell? As in, no other entity can "steal" or recreate your idea from all of your effort in building your code base? Furthermore nostr and arguably most of us devs believe in a world where the developer's brain and ability to ship a product far outweigh the value in existing source code. Many commercial or enterprise products (think of linux distros) are 100million dollar businesses building open source products. Beyond that the likelihood your product is going to compete directly with a fork of itself is arguably none depending on your licensing strategy, because they don't have you and your vision. And even further if you're worried about a fork competition, you are already in competition with other similar applications. This is where licensing choices weigh heavily. @Laeserin or @MichaelJ would you have any more thoughs here?

Just something to think about is all. I don't want to pressure you into OSS, I do think closed source can be necessary in some cases. Specifically for nostr, I think many of us come here expecting to escape the requirement to blindly trust the product and its developers. I trust many of us here to be morally aligned but that can be quite naive. I personally prefer copy-left. Many prefer completely permissive licensing. For code that produces a product, I would personally (and usually do for my own code) choose the GPLv2+ or AGPLv3+. Both areGNU copy-left license. It requires anyone who uses your code build their own product to release your source (or their modified source) publicly. Damus is GPL I believe and its looks like Amethyst is MIT. AGPL has the requirement for server usage. That is if your code sits behind a production application but is not public facing, if changes were made, your code must be made available (with your name on it!) both modified AND your original source code. There are other more and less permissive licenses out there, but I appreciate the history of GNU and FSF defending developers using their licenses. It's probably going to take a while to choose a license you like, but it's meant to protect you AND your users/community. I may be on the extreme side, I won't lie, I like owning my code, and having my name displayed because I'm proud and have an ego, but I highly respect my user's rights, so once my code hits a user's hands, its theirs to do what they want with it. Free and always available as long as I'm working on it. That's why I use copy-left.

Thanks 🫂🫂🫂🫡

I generally agree that a strong product will still be profitable even if it's open source. However, the question remains of how the developer gets paid. With open-source code, anyone can build and run it, at least in theory, so you can't easily charge per-download or per-license key like some closed-source projects. If you have a client-server model, you could charge for server usage and earn money that way. That applies less to Nostr, though, due to the distributed relay model. One option I may explore in the future is a paid early access. Maybe v1.0 is free, but higher versions with new features are closed-source and behind a paywall. So users who want the latest and greatest features can pay to see them sooner, but the free user base continues to receive maintenance and support.

You lost me at "I do think closed source can be necessary"

yeah, at some point soon hiding code will be a waste of time and cheap to reverse

And I appreciate the feedback you give from looking into it!

And this is why I think closed-source is a dead end. It's too easy to figure out implementations, if you're motivated enough.