Oops. My phone messed up this comment. I meant to say "+1!!!!!! Foss is boss!"

I get that the dev has put in a lot of work; but one of the benefits of open sourcing is that people can help out develop as well! I would gladly donate if this software was free, even.

(Also, open source doesn't mean free. There are plenty of apps that cost money but still allow contributions!)

@sean_townsend Ok, let's rewind a bit here.

I did NOT say that he should put up his software as "Gratis".

I'm seriously starting to think you're a bot here.

"" as a software developer myself I cant believe you’re even asking this

What did you write? Is it still used today? By how many people?

There are countless softwares out there, many proprietary, many open source. In my life, I've been sorrounded by proprietary software. Most, if not all, the proprietary software I used in, like, ?2002? died. Nobody wanted to reverse engineer an entire application you could simply rewrite yourself in a few months. Even good/working software was eventually discarded because the company behind it disappeared or simply didn't want to maintain that software anymore.

This is one of my subjective reason for why I tend to only use open nowadays, it's just more stable to future situations/evolutions.

Of course, I believe that, as a single developer, this would be kind of heavy. Even on this forum everyone is already referring to the single developer behind this project by name, everyone is constantly pinging him, so open sourcing this will not be easy and will probably be stressful initially, especially with all of these people making random posts and not reading everything from start to end ;D

So yeah, I know it takes a large amount of effort. Everything takes effort and time. The purpose of this post was to show support/interest in open sourcing the software in question. Nothing more, nothing less. It will be up to Mike to decide.

Of course, going forward, our society as a whole will have to move onto open source software if we want to survive. We've seen what proprietary software brings, it brings confusion, it brings suffering to the people using it.

This is just an electronics simulation software, it's not essential software for our society, it makes no sense to pressure the dev to release the source, he may or may not do it.

But, eventually, everything will become open. It's just because it lasts in time, it's resilient to the passage of time, and it has an higher amount of potential compared to software where the average user just has no way of fixing a bug or getting a translation.

There is also the problem of our economy being incompatible with selling software, and I believe this could also help Mike into more efficiently selling his software.

Essentially, our economy is built from the ground up to sell something that is in limited quantity. But, with the advent of digital economy, this creates problems.

For example, you may sell <SOFTWARE> at 10$. Or at 30$. Or at 100$. Or at 1000$.

There is no way to define a price, as such software can be infinitely reproduced. The only cost is the time effort by a certain number of developers. But, once you recover those costs, how much do you sell your software for? Do you just sell it at an absurd price like Microsoft?

I mean, it works, Microsoft is indeed one of the biggest companies in the world. But for how long will this be possible? What will happen once ALL software companies, once ALL software costs as much as possible, because there is fundamentally no metrics upon which to define its price?

Once all of the interested electronics engineers and hobbists buy this software, Mike will essentially run out of money. What will he do? Will he start selling DLCs? Should he remove existing features and re-sell them? You can see it doesn't work in the long run :D , there would be no more incentive for him to continue developing this.

It is fundamentally a broken system. Instead, there's a much better way, and that is a support-based Patreon-like development style, where you have a support fund on Patreon (or gofundme, or ko.fi, or whatever else), and, at the same time, sell on Steam.

This way, you both sell on Steam, maybe with a disclaimer saying that you also have a Patreon, and then also have a Patreon thingy too for long term sustainance.

I subjectively believe this to be the most efficient of the modern methods of making money with libre software. Of course, I could be wrong, or I could be right. I do not believe my reasoning to be in the wrong, don't you agree?

For all the software I write, I'll personally and subjectively always prefer the fully FLOSS way, but hey, that's just me, and I understand people have different opinions and ideas about this.