Not everyone has that luxury, some people need to earn money. That's why I sell software instead of giving it away for free. It's fine if you want to get everything for free, you're just not one of my customers then.

Everyone is commenting on the blog but not the service. I remain skeptical:

A. Either it will remain obscure and not see any real use

B. (Less likely) It will get abused to hell before it is shutdown.

Claims of removing violating content “immediately” seem unrealistic under decent usage, unless that $600 can grow unbounded.

I have taken a road somewhere between FOSS and paid software. I have a data management system that has been in a 'free open beta' for a few years now. Anyone can download it and try it for free.

Right now it can be used as a great tool or analyzing data. Feedback is appreciated but not expected. I try to respond to bug fixes and feature requests in a timely manner, but I am not required to do that.

If it catches on, I might charge something like $10 for an individual lifetime license. Businesses might be on some kind of subscription.

As this is FOSS, I don't see why you need the security review (by who, with what qualifications?). Any users can look at the source code and arrange their own reviews as they think necessary.

With AI it feels writing software that is open is less attractive. It's hard to trust OSS made recently b/c you can tell if someone knows what they're doing and even spent any time on quality. Also, often times people don't reach for software others make (unless it's boring and old stuff, in which case this advice doesn't apply.)

All my personal software is MIT licensed. Selling software isn't my bag, baby.

One of the room elephants: Most free software projects will have 0 users beyond the author.

This is why I'm building free "spite apps" in homage to Larry David's spite stores [0]. The goal being to push back on enshitification of tech and dark patterns like mandatory subscriptions, ads and user data tracking.

As a solo indie-dev, writing free software (as in you don't need to pay anything) is fine, but I usually do not make the project (entirely) open source due to the added churn & maintenance.

In my experience, setting expectations early in my apps ("I'm a solo indie dev", "this is a free app", "you can reach out to me through email but don't expect super quick responses") helped reduce entitled users and - quite the opposite - people were super happy to get replies from me solving their problems.

[0] Blog post about it: https://sxp.studio/blog/spite-apps-the-latte-larrys-of-apps

All my publicly available code on GitHub dot com is available for free for anyone to clone and copy.

What is not free is my time, my attention, and support. I don't know how open source maintainers do it but I can't imagine doing it for free.

I always hoped that AI would enable people to take paid software and remake it so they could give it away for free. I started developing websites about 20 years ago back then apart from the big name software and Ide’s. Everything was free. Nowadays everything is a subscription.