I Don’t Want That Life at Any Price

For months the plan was to turn the tools into a business after proving them on real projects. The proof part worked. But I finally admitted what the plan actually required of me: a working life centered on sales and outreach.

I don’t want that life at any price.

So today I dropped the commercial plan. I’m going to publish both tools. Spernakit will be open source; it exists to be copied. aidd will be Fair Source, available for any use except making it available as a competing commercial product or service, with source-available releases that become open source after two years.

Going public safely took real work. The code contains no secrets, but it’s full of references to my private world: machine names, file paths, the names of all my personal apps. Rather than trying to scrub years of history, each project will debut as a brand-new public repository containing one clean, scrubbed snapshot. Both codebases got their scrub today, plus the legal and community files (license, contribution guide, code of conduct) every public project needs.

I expected this to feel heavier than it did. After six months of proving the tools, I still didn’t want to sell them. I’m relieved to have made the decision.