Selling software is a bad business to be in.

Prices of goods tend to drop to their marginal price. That would be zero for software, since it doesn't cost anything to distribute once it's made.

Your better off getting your software in as many hands as possible and sell related scarce goods instead, such as your time and expertise (service contracts, books you wrote, software writing service).

In other words, the software is a great promotional tool for other services and goods. Or even for yourself. Like you mentioned in your update, you could gain notoriety from it, which you can trade in for connections, a better job, etc.

Seems like you already reached that conclusion. I really really skimmed the topic, but Techdirt has a lot to say on this subject if you want to read more.

In reply to Re: Selling your Perl app by ikegami
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.