alt Hacker News> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge.
I've run into this too with my own app. I thought people would like a Lua GUI framework that's professional grade and gives you full access to WinAPI via Lua. I was using DragonRuby as my model.
So I wasted a thousand hours making the app and its documentation. Turns out, even after people understood what it was (I suck at marketing), everyone still agreed that whatever it could become or ever evolve into was still not worth a dime.
Now I'm faced with a decision. Do I open source it? I think, no. What's the point? Marketing for my skills as a developer? There's no more need for software consultants now with Copilot/etc. I have to change careers.
Then, should I open source it altruistically? What for? First of all, giving things away for free is not inherently good. One negative side effect is teaching people not to rely on their own industry. Another is that they may use it for evil. And then, it feels like such a waste to let the code die out.
But everything eventually goes to waste.
Replies
> What's the point? Marketing for my skills as a developer? There's no more need for software consultants now with Copilot/etc. I have to change careers.
I encourage you to find a way out of this belief, or at least least fend it off as long as possible.
You can see from recent HN postings that most people are not experiencing career-ending levels of performance from LLMs.
Did you reach out to Lua heavy shops?
Hey! (firstly recognized you from your other post on HN)
Personally I would love the idea of creating a lua application natively. You don't know how much I wanted it now that you mention it.
I remember looking for such solutions,finding none, then I even thought of using kotlin apps with lua integration but didn't like the idea of learning kotlin
For some reason, even though I have only played just a little bit with lua, there are tons of options which compile down to lua which can make it really powerful too and so for the end developer, there are tons of possibilities and it starts out being so simple!
I think the problem with lua was that there is a lack of libraries & projects regarding it so this might actually help it
I have another question tho and I'd love it if you can answer it.
Is there any way that I can write a cli application in golang or port it to something with just glue code being lua and using it for android somehow?
I don't want to create an android application in golang itself for what its worth because I find the primitive a little lacking (what do I use, wails?)
I have heard people use python kite or something iirc which looked good but python-go support isn't the best & i dont even know if its on android
If you can actually provide lua as the UI/UX support (I am imagining something simple but powerful) with code being allowed in other languages where I can get some powerful libraries (golang), I would be super interested in it.
Regarding Open source, I would personally trust the project a lot more if this was open source.
That being said, I understand the worry of changing careers/consultancy/AI marketing because I am still a teenager in high school. I have anxiety because I have an exam for the colleg ein 2 days, I am a bit cooked haha but I guess I just gotta try
Your fears are valid and somehow I imagine you in a position wayy similar to raylib & I remembered this post.
https://gist.github.com/raysan5/04a2daf02aa2a6e79010331f77bf...
Honestly, what are your thoughts in teaching at a college about app development with lua, I mean I am a teenager and I would die for such a course!
Although I was never into roblox, some of my friends were and they treat lua as the holy grail because of roblox development and roblox's development community is from what I can gather decently respected especially if you are teen, some even learn lua just for it.
so you can get people who are interested in already having some gui experience with lua (more in a game environment but still) and you tell them that you can make apps with it just as easily? People will be hooked.
Of course there is some LLM but honestly, nobody cares. LLM's wont be able to recreate your project, I am mostly sure of it.
Marketing is something that I relate with too because we never know what the public really really wants.
I mean, I will admit it, We people are kind of hypocrites (speaking from my behalf)
Sometimes we would open source project and want it to be sustainable without paying the devs or donating to them, that sucks. Some of us just want open source for ideological reasons and um, honestly, I will admit it. It's your code, do what you want it, you built it and you should be proud of it!
We can only give suggestions but I recommend you to create some video of the project so that I can see it.
App developments are fucking nightmares. I had even thought of using godot just to create app development. Any new solution provided decent enough can absolutely help.
Personally I believe you should wait for some time & try to write a blog post about it. I want to hear all the nerdy details!
Create a show HN post, I saw tomhow mention to me how much of the audience wants originality and the idea of "aha moments"/something novel. Provide us with knowledge of what aha moments did you discover during building this, I am soo curious myself!
Good luck man and I genuinely hope the best of luck for you man! Just message me whenever you feel like it or mail me, Will try to respond to ya if you ever need my help (I don't think so but I'd love to playtest what you are mentioning too!)
Oh yea just a teeny bti suggestion adding on that golang one, can you just make it so that I can have a very simple and easy/fast way of compiling golang cli applications into gui android applications with lua code. I personally want this so bad because there are soo many good and lovely open source golang cli and I wanted to be part of f-droid by creating an application gui for some golang cli tool we might use but it felt sooooooo hard that I gave up. (Yes I even used tauri and ended up waking up till 5 am debugging)
The pain point's definitely real and LLM's won't be able to make this. Only the people like you who are truly passionate about such projects can make it. It's a unique project and you should be proud of it and I hope that the project has a good future!
The point of open-sourcing is to put it on peoples’ map at all.
Development tools have to be fully dependable (maintained, no rug pull) and proprietary software just carries too much risk in that regard for a lot of people.