The chemfp project: problems selling free software
You have probably just not understood the concept of free software in the first place...<p>I&#x27;m in the opinion that everyone is free to decide to do a proprietary closed source software if they accept the consequences.<p>But just think about the fact that your software is built on top of other free software and knowledge. Python for example.
What would you have done without it? If you had to pay thousands of dollars to get a visual studio + dev licences, plus additional thousands of dollars of licenses of proprietary libraries to use.
You would not have been able to create something like that without being in a big Corp.<p>Also, by being proprietary your are closing yourself a lot of opportunities and contributors. Nowadays a lot of people will not touch your software if it is not free. Even if some could get a &#x27;no-fee&#x27; version.<p>The point being that open source is not the issue. The issue is that you have not found the right model to finance it.<p>But as stated by you, you started first with the goal to generate money before the goal to create something great. So chances were already good that it would fail in the first place.