Dude, you could've easily made money out it. I for one would've definitely bought it. Your product is superb, simple and gives us capability to add stuff on top of it like authentication
No - you didn't read what (s)he wrote. You should charge. Charging people real money gets you real users who give you real feedback. It allows you to allocate more money to the development of the project.
Providing this tool for free is a cost to you.
Sure, allow a certain number of photos free of charge and charge for more.
I also agree. I want to pay for this, not donate. This can be very important for my personal needs and I want to rely on it. If I donate, I don't get the feeling that the project is moving forward.
OK, seems everybody wants to pay per copy, am I rite? I think that is a pretty bad idea that will slow down adoption and development. Yes, this is an open-source project and more developers could help out. I think developers are less likely to jump on the wagon to help out a duo that gets all the money.
Instead, don't try to monetize this now. Make adoption and interest grow. Then sell a hosted variant at lychee.io, Wordpress stylee. Or be more imaginative than that and come up with a better idea.
Why be more imaginative? It sounds a pretty simple offering to me, and is highly transparent.
A hosted variant isn't a bad idea (I was going to ask if there were recipes for EC2, Docker etc... some people might want to "self" host on a machine they control) but it's more "value added" than the original codebase.
Many developers have been selling support for WordPress for a long time. Even back when it wasn't as massively popular as it is now. I wouldn't mind contributing to an open source project where some developers sell support as long as I can fork away when there is a disagreement (read: permissive license).
That's ok, but that's a services business. That means committing time. It's difficult to build a fly-wheel that way. I guess you could outsource on oDesk or similar.
I do not think anyone should sell products without understanding the service part of doing business.
if you buy something, people expect someone to be responsible for the product. This mean you got to spend time on providing service, or it get defined by most people as a cash grab.
