I'll pay 15x more for Sync if it's Open-Sourced
I want Sync to succeed for the benefit of the community. Open-source guarantees that the community will always retain that benefit.
I wonder. Is this sentiment common among members of the Lemmy community?
I don't care about it being open source.
LJD has proven to be an excellent dev, who also listens to his users. He's built to a lot of trust as a result.
If he sold Sync, then my answer might be different.
It is fine to me if its not open source, as long as it communicates with an open platform like lemmy. then that is enough for me to want to give them my money if its a good app and makes the lemmy experience easy yet amazing.
LJ is considering a sub for premium features of Sync for Lemmy (which I'm against, would much rather just buy the app outright). With that in mind, I can see him open sourcing this application.
Nor should he. FOSS is great, but not all apps need to be FOSS, and not all developers can afford to work for free / donations.
I really hope that won't be the only option. I've used Sync for so many years and would buy premium in heart beat (I bought lifetime ultra on Sync for Reddit) but I'm afraid I won't subscribe with an ongoing payment. I understand it from the devs point of view as far income is concerned but there's just too many things require subscriptions these days.
Everyone wants a piece of the pie but the pie isn't big enough
Same here, not to sure about sync yet (baconreader user), but one-time payment for a good app is acceptable, maybe even a rebuy when there is a huge update, but no subscriptions here. I refuse to add a permanent payment option to my google account. (I don't trust them, enough)
If he goes that route I would prefer a lifetime option as well
Nope, no need for open-source. If it was so easy to make an iOS app we'd have one available on the App Store already. There's works in progress and TestFlight releases just to cater for the increasing demand but even those will take time to reach full maturity and polish.
There's no reason for someone to work so hard and give away their IP for free. From what you see from many apps, the authors are continuously working hard to work on it, adding new features, fixing bugs and with it being still the relatively early days of the Fediverse, keeping up and reflecting changes on the platform.
App developers should be free to decide how they protect their IP and how they market their product. I gladly paid for Apollo and would be more than happy to pay for my preferred Fedi app to support the effort behind it.
A better approach would be for the Kbin/Lemmy project to open-source an SDK for iOS