Build it for yourself

[joshowens]

http://cooking.fourbeansoup.com/post/500916369/build-it-for-yourself

[SlyShy]

Not new advice, but it's worth being reminded about. I think programmers actually follow this principle quite a bit. It's just that once they have written a nice tool, they release it as open source software. For a lot of people, I think the message needs to be, "built it for yourself, and try to sell it too".

[joshowens → SlyShy]

SlyShy,

Great point! There is a fine line between open source and profitable apps, I just made the call the other day to open source something instead of making a paid app.

[dpritchett → joshowens]

Why not sell your newly open sourced app? Lots of companies do it. If not the app you can certainly sell services around it.

[stralep → SlyShy]

Would it be profitable to have advertising in open-source program?

Of course, there would be checkbox to turn them off (or whatever). No recompilation needed.