There are two points of popular open source mythology this post will share my experience with:

• People won’t use your project if you don’t use an Open Source Initiative-approved license
• People won’t contribute to to your project if you don’t use an Open Source Initiative-approved license

Many people have ideas about how society should be like and what must be done to change institutions and to work for a revolution. But this is not enough. Often these ideas do not conform to reality and if they do conform to reality there is only one way to test them: Try to put them to work and see if they succeed. Testing our ideas in concrete work is the only way we will ever know if they are correct.

A program is educational source (edu source) software if:

• The source code is available to individuals for personal use, modification, learning and reference

komorebi is edu source software, and the Komorebi License is an edu source license.[1]

Any software license which ensures access to source code fulfils the criteria to be considered an edu source license.

[1]: In addition to being an edu source license, the Komorebi License is also a firewall license, which serves to protect an individual’s freedom to refuse by default.

You’re likely here because you’ve discovered that I generally refuse to use open source licenses for my popular software projects, and you want to engage me in a discussion.

Here is a list of things I consider before accepting an invitation from someone to engage in a discussion about why I do not use open source software licenses.

• Skin in the game - if you have not created, released, and maintained publicly developed software with a user base of a non-trivial size (10k+ users), you’re better off discussing software licensing in the abstract with others whose only hands-on experience is discussing software licensing in the abstract
• Acknowledgment of open source licensing’s genocide problem
• Proposals to address open source licensing’s genocide problem - if you do not consider open source licensing’s genocide problem to be a issue, then we don’t have any common ground for discussion

I made $901.49 in my first month selling commercial use software licenses.

This $901.49 came from 14 customers, 6 of whom purchased monthly license subscriptions and 8 of whom purchased annual license subscriptions.

My most popular piece of software, komorebi, is a tiling window manager for Windows, published under an educational source license which does not permit any kind of commercial use.

At the beginning of 2025, I started offering dedicated individual commercial use licenses for people who want to use it at work.

People who make useful content and services intended for interactive human use available for free have written at length about the ongoing issues with AI crawlers scouring the web in an insatiable search for new training data.

Some people are coming up with interesting technical solutions to the problems posed by AI crawlers, but I have ultimately opted for a much simpler solution: a paywall.

Kullish is a project that I operated free of charge for all users from 2020 until January 2025.

In 2024 I received $1861.88 in sponsorships via GitHub Sponsors for my work on komorebi, the tiling window manager for Windows, which has continued to grow beyond my wildest dreams; it currently has 10k stars on GitHub, 106k downloads and almost 2000 members in the community Discord.

Below is the monthly breakdown of the sponsorship payouts received in 2024:

In the post covering 2023, I wrote:

The big mistake

Using Tailwind CSS for Notado is the single biggest mistake I have ever made in my career as a developer.

I cannot overstate the amount of technical debt that this has introduced, and how it has compounded over the years since this decision was taken. Never use this for a one-man SaaS project.

One of the biggest consequences of this mistake was that introducing dark mode immediately became a non-trivial task, especially when compared to Kullish, where I had the good sense to use Bulma, and adding dark mode was the simple case of adding a single link element to my existing base HTML template:

Earlier this week I saw an Ask HN post titled “What are some iconic comments on HN?”

Over the years, I’ve seen some iconic comments on HN. Inspired by this, I want to create a website showcasing the most memorable discussions and comments on this website.

What are some of your favorite comments on HN?

I have been saving comments from Hacker News on a variety of subjects and topics since 2020 when I finally ditched traditional URL-focused bookmarking services and created Notado to be able to save, archive and organize comments on discussion websites quickly and easily.

Certainly, no contributors get into projects with the sole purpose to get a financial gain out of them. Open source has never been about money either. But for you as an author, the lack of funds to sustain your ideas and pay for even a small portion of the time you’re spending on them is—I’m not going to lie—devastating. It may not be your concern at first but it will inevitably become one when your ideas gain popularity, demanding significantly more time than there are hours in a day.

A few weeks ago I ran nix flake update to get the latest versions of CLI tools that I regularly use from nixos-unstable.

atuin is one of those tools which I started using relatively recently and quickly became a huge fan of.

I run it on all of my machines, and I can’t overstate how amazing it is to have all of my shell history across all of my machines synced. I also self-host the atuin server, because why not?