'm not ashamed to say that my first thought was: can I profit?

And indeed, there is no shame. Nearly all software is written for profit in some sense. Sometimes it's monetary profit, sometimes the new software relieves you of tedious, boring work, sometimes the profit is fame (or XP on perlmonks ;-).

As a hobbyist I mostly write programs because I want my job done (and because it's fun). I publish the more useful programs as open source because that usually implies getting feedback and helpful feature suggestions (I'm not creative enough to think of some of the really useful features myself). Plus open source projects really bring traffic to my websites ;-)

One of the reasons not to sell my software is that it puts me under a kind of mental pressure: if one of my customers buys software from me it just has to work. IMHO. And I don't think I can guarantee that, so I feel like I'm cheating when I'm selling something that just might not work for the buyer.

But I still profit from my software, mostly in terms of skills. And that pays when I do contract work.

I hope that I'll never have to make money from selling software because I think it would kill the fun.

(As a side note there are other, ethical reasons for me to publish my software as open source, but they don't belong here.)

In reply to Re: Selling your Perl app by moritz
in thread Selling your Perl app by whakka

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.