Publish your code
When I first “arrived” in Nostr Dev World, I was mildly horrified by the expectation that we all wear hoodies and open-source everything. I still generally avoid hoodies (although I’m wearing one in my latest profile pic ☺️), but I’ve warmed up to FOSS because I’ve been analyzing the dynamic for successful strategies.
How to make money handing out free stuff
Nobody reads it, anyway
Nobody even reads anyone else’s code, unless they work directly with them. We all have our own code to work on. We got no time for that. Publish everything. Include some cake recipes in the code base and see if anyone even notices.
The idea that we’re all stalking each others’ code-bases is the opposite of the truth. We barely can get our own team members to read what we write. Very busy, maybe later, TL;DR, did you write a unit test?
We publish primarily to be overtly transparent. Someone could look, particularly for anything involving zaps or other “hot topics”, and we have nothing to hide.
Why buy a copy of something free?
Strong branding and professional-quality service make more difference than code. A larger team, that can deliver that, wants to offer something unique, not just copy-paste from someone else, because that leads to a “knock-off” status, like a fake Gucci bag.
Knock-off production is an effect of an over-saturated market, which we don’t have. Any market share you sacrifice now will be some you will regret missing, later, and the biggest market here is FOSS.
Besides, if you think it’s hard to make money off of FOSS, try marketing knock-off FOSS. It’s the same thing, but built by people too stupid or lazy to build their own product.
Lean into it
The people most-inclined to read and fork are individual developers who want to customize the code with some feature and end up with an app-for-me. Figure out a way to market to them by making your app easily customizable. That makes forking pointless, as every installed version is then a de facto fork, and your app becomes the Core App everyone else branches off from.
Then you get fans and auxiliary developers. Fans talking about your product is the most-efficient marketing. Auxiliary developers are the most-efficient testers.