Amazingly, this (and the root comment up top) are actually getting downvoted. I hadn't realized the sentiment among open source developers against making money from their craft was so strong.
But it shouldn't be. We, as developers, shouldn't harbor any ill will toward the OP should he decide to pull the open source version and sell it for profit. We certainly shouldn't advise him against it or recommend an alternative open source license that better guarantees that nobody can make money off this excellent piece of software.
Geeks like us tend to have a natural aversion to making money by selling our work directly, as though it's somehow dirty or wrong in some way that we can't quite articulate.
But we need to get over that.
We have a guy here (patio11) whose job this normally is, but he seems to have taken the morning off so I'll do this in his place:
On behalf of the Internet, I hereby grant you, the developer, permission to charge money for your software.
I know you (probably) mean well but you're missing the point and come off as fairly condescending.
Did you consider the possibility that the author already has a job that pays him extremely well and that the ROI he gets in spending time providing customer support/marketing for a commercial iOS app is actually losing money for him?
You should save the "you are allowed to make money" talk for people who are actually trying to sell software and doing it badly (Because they undervalue the work they created) instead of directing it at someone producing what looks like a labor of love and is not interested in marketing everything he has ever created.
Did you consider the possibility that the author already has a job that pays him extremely well and that the ROI he gets in spending time providing customer support/marketing for a commercial iOS app is actually losing money for him?
I think that's more a rationalization that developers use to convince themselves not to charge for their stuff than a reality. I've certainly never experienced any support/marketing overload with any of my products.
He already has the app in the app store. His support/marketing is where it is already. All he need do is tick a box marked "allow people to send me money" in his app store control panel and he's done. In short, there's no "down" for the app to go. It's already maxed out on the "losing money" front, and doesn't seem to be overburdening him.
On the customer support side, he might actually see that go down too by charging. Here's yesterday's discussion on exactly that:
Far from it. Yikes, I've never bought into the valley startup idea, where you spend all your time working on your thing. I spend maybe a dozen hours a month maintaining my little software empire and supporting customers.
There's a reason I promote the lifestyle. Having a little pile of software products paying you a full developer salary in exchange for answering a few emails a week is a pretty good place to be.
I think the point that's missed (especially by you) is that proprietary, closed source software is fundamentally more insecure than open source.
As a user of proprietary software, you can't inspect that code for bugs and you can't inspect it for malicious code - you just have to take the vendor's word for it that "it is really secure, honest! And there aren't any backdoors put in by the US government/china/whoever"
I don't know whether chatsecure is any good or would withstand attacks by a nation state, but if I were a security researcher or an aid organisation in the 3rd world, I could look at the source and find out.
