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?
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πππ«Thank you for sharing. I benefited a lot. Can you share more about the choice of open source license?
You don't seem to have a lightning address, so I can't zap you.
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.
My thoughts in FOSS.
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