I don't understand this attitude. Some humans have to eat and put a roof over their heads sometimes, and extracting consulting fees from open-source work (i.e. the Redhat model) is not always a paying business model. A hybrid model is often the best way to compromise.

Disclaimer: I'm pursuing a similar solution on an app I'm working on. The CLI will be free and open-source (and will have feature parity with the GUI), but charging money for the GUI will also help support that development (and put my son through school etc.)

And by "feature parity", I really mean it- The GUI will be translated into 22 languages... and so will the CLI. ;) (Claude initially argued against this feature. I made my arguments for it. It: "You make a compelling argument. Let's do it." LOL)

The lowest level of it is already available and fully open-source: https://github.com/pmarreck/validate

I'm building something on top of that which will have a nice GUI, do some other data integrity stuff, and also have a CLI. And will be for sale in the Mac and Windows app stores.

Personally, I understand people need to make money but this tends to be a death spiral (enshittification). So I tend to go for solutions without those incentives at all. Or at least use the free self hosted option.

I wonder why you jumped into the mesh vpn market, it's so saturated. Theres literally hundreds of solutions out there (niche ones included for the mainstream ones it's probably 10 or so), many non profit options included. Is there really a niche you can offer that the others don't?

Edit: ah by doing the same thing you didn't necessarily mean a mesh vpn? I don't really understand what your thing does but not vpn.

I was just saying it because there's a new Show HN mesh VPN thing weekly now.