I think a more relevant question is, "Do you have a realistic plan for how you're going to generate revenue from this software in the next year or two?" If the answer isn't, "yes", then your prospect of ever making money out of the software is probably just wishful thinking.
Even if the software represents a significant investment, it's frequently easier to create wealth than it is to capture the value of that wealth. One big realization of the open source movement was that even if you can't capture the value of your software by selling it under proprietary terms, you can still derive value from it via indirect reciprocity by releasing it under a FOSS license.
I don't think it is fred itself she wants to make money off of, but rather the C++ libraries she wrote that it uses, as well as an automatic build system. Other clients do pay for work based on those, hence the reluctance to give those away.
Open-source and profit aren't mutually exclusive, in this case he was unable to get enough of the latter to justify the effort of the former, perfectly reasonable.
You're both right, that's what the blog seems to be saying to me. Can't argue with either. I think this is also a not-so-hidden hint of 'if you wanted this open source, you should have paid more attention to that kickstarter!'
I can't really blame people for not backing that kickstarter either though. Why $30K for an OSS feed reader when there are so many open source ones [1] that could be easily retooled to most purposes? The market for this stuff is so incredibly over saturated as it is. Rather make something new and different if you're going to do a kickstarter.
There's a vague description of being an RSS reader that you have control over. There's all kinds of talk of the various technologies that Fred sits on top of, but very little talk about what Fred itself actually does. There's a single image on the Kickstarter page, which isn't the product itself, and looks like something whipped together in Paint in 5 minutes time. There's a link to a demo site, but, again, it's not entirely clear what's going on when you get there.
It's not that people are unwilling to pitch in or that $30k is necessarily even too much for that, but it has to be something people want and you have to give them a reason to want it. The lack of any kind of compelling pitch seems to be what killed the Kickstarter in this case.
That's the key, rule 1 for introducing a product is someone has probably already done it, so make sure you provide some value that your existing competition doesn't have. After playing with 'fred' for a few minutes, I don't see how I would care to use this over any of the alternatives.
