Jason Antic

Not merely hearing; I've used those justifications myself before. And I was mistaken. All that work is gone now, and never amounted to anything. With open source, at least some of it has mattered (at least in a small way).

The crux of the issue here seems like you're dead set on believing that giving away the code = giving away the money. It's just not true.

It means having to find a round about way of making money on what took all of the work, and placing our bets on something else that we really doubt we can compete on (design, scalability, etc). We can't afford that right now as a two person team. We sell reearch.

Why do you believe showing the code will remove your ability to make money with it? Do you think MyHeritage wouldn't have contacted you if the code was available? There's a cognitive dissonance here: your code *was* open source and yet you still made money.

Yeah that's exactly how it would have gone. They were quietly using my open source until they found out about the code that I didn't give a way yet that looked much better. If it were free and there was no alternative, why would they contact me?

Your code would be released under a restrictive license. Are you saying that they'd blatantly rip off the code? They'd contact you for the usual reasons: They want to make money with your code, and your code prohibits anyone from making money with it except you.

Here comes the army of lawyers I don't have.

You keep saying that lawyers are necessary. Your position on this is "Companies will break the law unless I have lawyers to stop them." It's ironic that you're so idealistic with politics but so jaded with business. :)