My step dad doesn't know how to share links over messenger (constantly sends me screenshots of pages), but he runs Thinkpad Manjaro for last 3 years without issues. At first, I was afraid that I will have to do some sort of support regularly or answer questions, but besides "Which music player should I install?" it was crickets for the last 3 years.
Not all licensing features have been rolled out yet, so let me briefly explain the overall vision.
DevTUI will be available to everyone as a free product, with no limitations on functionality. However, it will include a nagging popup prompting users to support further development. Users can remove this nag screen by paying a (reasonable) one-time fee.
The inspiration for this payment model comes from Postico and Sublime Text — two products I personally support and admire.
Since DevTUI doesn’t incur any recurring costs, I’m okay with people using it for free. That said, I still want to encourage users to contribute financially to the project rather than relying on the usual “begging for open source funding” approach.
Sorry, you lost me here on your game analogy. I haven't played games for a while. Or maybe our understanding of DRM term differs. I have never heard before use this term in the context of a software, more with books and music.
How does my solution differ from something that Postico and Sublime Text are doing?
My plan is to offer a fully featured application for free, but with slightly annoying pop-up that users can remove by paying a (reasonable) one-time fee. Is there a better way to go about this? I'm really curious.
As the author, I'd be happy to release this as open source, but there's one issue... I want to continue building DevTUI and PoshTUI, but right now, I'm only able to work on them in the evenings—after the kids and wife are asleep.
If this project generates some revenue, I could reduce time on my main gig and dedicate more hours to improve these tools.
What other way would you suggest me to do so? Besides DRM?
This project started as closed source, has never been open source, and currently there are no plans to open source it.
The website uses the default GitHub Pages template. The "View on GitHub" button is part of the template and github offer limited customization options for that.