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Show HN: DrawDB – open-source online database diagram editor (a retro)

(www.drawdb.app)
263 points 1ilit | 1 comments | 09 Apr 25 00:20 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

One year ago I open-sourced my very first 'real' project and shared it here. I was a college student in my senior year and desperately looking for a job. At the time of sharing it i couldn't even afford a domain and naively let someone buy the one i had my eyes on lol. It's been a hell of a year with this blowing up, me moving to another country, and switching 2 jobs.

In a year we somehow managed to hit 26k stars, grow a 1000+ person discord community, and support 37 languages. I couldn't be more grateful for the community that helped this grow, but now i don't know what direction to take this project in.

All of this was an accident. But now I feel like I'm missing out on not using this success. I have been thinking of monetization options, but not sure if I wanna go down that route. I like the idea of it being free and available for everyone but also can't help but think of everything that could be done if committed full-time or even had a small team. I keep telling myself(and others) i'll do something if i meet a co-founder, but doubt and fear of blowing this up keeps back.

How would you proceed?

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metadata ◴[09 Apr 25 14:11 UTC] No.43632366[source]▶
Just for the context, I've been making (and selling) database (migration/translation) tools for 20-ish years.

What you have built can definitely become a product supporting you with a very nice income. Free version can stay free but you can sell solo licenses and team licenses as subscriptions. Paid license users will also have your support - and that matters to companies.

As others have said, commercial features can be built on top of the OSS product, like Electron desktop client, support for more databases, for views/procedures etc.

There is no downside to trying to commercialize this. Whoever wants to use what you have built so far can continue and I guarantee that many companies would be happy to give you $50/month for a more advanced version with support.

(edit for typo)

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ranger_danger ◴[09 Apr 25 18:23 UTC] No.43635530[source]▶
> There is no downside to trying to commercialize this

I know lots of people in the FOSS community who would stop using it as soon as you "sold out"... but those people probably don't represent the majority of potential users.

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evanelias ◴[09 Apr 25 18:59 UTC] No.43636160[source]▶
Legally, any enhanced version would need to remain FOSS anyway. It appears to be an AGPL-licensed project with 60+ contributors and no CLA, so the codebase has 60+ different copyright holders.

Monetization of a GPL or AGPL project generally involves a CLA so that the creator can offer closed-source and/or SaaS enhancements while still accepting third-party contributions. Without a CLA, the project creator would be violating the copyright license that was granted by the third-party code contributors. He/she doesn't own their code and cannot relicense it in a way that violates the AGPL.

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metadata ◴[10 Apr 25 09:22 UTC] No.43642207{3}[source]▶
I didn't look into the code structure - 60 contributors mean that yes, there is a problem.

People start something with good intentions, then the project grows to the point where it requires a lot of unpaid time, and there are expectations from the users. There are bills to pay and limited time in a day.

I would probably be irked if I contribute in my free time and then see my effort being used in a commercial product. Then again, in some products you may have one person doing 95% of the work and another 50 doing 5% of the work.

If OP is motivated, they can relinquish control over this project and start a completely new one from scratch with no code borrowed from the existing one but learnings can definitely be applied. The new commercial project would need to compete with the existing AGPL project - and that's a good thing. If 60 contributors are contributing significantly, FOSS project won't suffer and the OP will be able to live from something they are passionate about.

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1. notpushkin ◴[10 Apr 25 19:43 UTC] No.43647383{4}[source]▶
Or could they just reach out to contributors and ask them to help?

Or here’s another route: sell “licenses” regardless of the actual license. I think https://cyberduck.io/ has this: you can donate and get a key that removes the donation nag. If you do this, you can’t go after the pirates, but would you really want to spend your time on that? (Of course, I would still reach out to the contributors first, explain the situation and see if they are okay with all that.)

Good luck to the OP!