This is sad for me as a user, but I can fully understand his unwillingness to further engage with requests from entitled users. I myself had bad experiences with releasing open source, too.
That said, this is clearly a useful tool and I wouldn't be surprised if the user base was 10,000+ which means that if you'd make it $3 monthly to use as a commercial product, the revenue (after attrition) should be enough to pay for at least one part time employee to do the maintenance.
I would also expect that releasing this as a paid product, as opposed to open source, will actually reduce entitlement by users. Or at the very least, you can always just issue a refund and be done with it.
I would still hope for source code insight to make it transparent how this tool works. But that is not necessary a hindrance towards productizing it. Unreal Engine 4 is a commercial success, despite shipping with full source code.
> I would also expect that releasing this as a paid product, as opposed to open source, will actually reduce entitlement by users.
That is the very opposite of what I’d expect and have observed personally over the years. The folks who’ve paid a small amount are virtually always the most demanding and refunding them and asking them politely to go away just fuels their indignation further.
I've been selling a $9 Windows app for 5 years now and never had a case where someone continued to contact support after a refund. We did have people who had a system straight from hell where nothing worked as planned, but then again the users of those systems seemed to be aware that it's their computer and not my app.
That said, this is clearly a useful tool and I wouldn't be surprised if the user base was 10,000+ which means that if you'd make it $3 monthly to use as a commercial product, the revenue (after attrition) should be enough to pay for at least one part time employee to do the maintenance.
I would also expect that releasing this as a paid product, as opposed to open source, will actually reduce entitlement by users. Or at the very least, you can always just issue a refund and be done with it.
I would still hope for source code insight to make it transparent how this tool works. But that is not necessary a hindrance towards productizing it. Unreal Engine 4 is a commercial success, despite shipping with full source code.