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What should Tool become — open source or with community Edition?

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Hey everyone,

I've been building a labelling tool, a desktop app (PyQt6) for capturing and annotating gesture datasets — think of it as a companion tool for gesture recognition pipelines like Gesto, making it easier to collect, label, and export hand landmark data for training models.

I'm at a fork in the road on direction, and I'd love your input:

1. Open source it — release it freely (currently GPL-3.0), let the community use it, contribute, and shape where it goes.

2. Build a paid/commercial version — invest in polish, support, and features, and offer it as a proper product.

A few things I'm weighing:

  • Open source could grow adoption faster and build trust in the gesture-recognition/CV space

  • A paid version could fund continued development and let me focus more time on it

  • There's also a possible middle ground — open core with paid add-ons, or free for individuals/paid for teams

What would you rather see? And if you've built or used similar dev tools, what worked (or didn't) for you?

Curious to hear your thoughts — genuinely undecided here and want to build something people actually want.

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What feedback have you heard the most from early users?

 Yeah, Got some feedback for the first version. Mostly good and some place for improvements.

Do you think companies and individuals need different versions?

 Not at the first. But, later down the road- they might need

what's your biggest fear with going fully open source?

 No fear . I am planning to go Community + Opensource first. Then see how it takes off.
The thing that I am still thinking is about is monetization ways if I go opensource. But, yeah let me worry about that at later stage.

IIf you launched it paid tomorrow, who do you think would buy first?

 Yeah, I never thought about launching paid in the first stage. I am talking Opensource vs community edition with paid one. I may have phrased it wrong in the forum. But, yeah let us see .

   Community plus open source makes sense for the code, but I think gesture data needs a separate trust model. If contributors record their hands or signing, I’d make consent, permitted uses, deletion, and the dataset license explicit at capture and export rather than assume the app’s GPL license covers the samples. That governance may matter more to adoption than the paid-versus-community split.

   Thanks for the comment Eduard.
We are not capturing the data and users don't contribute with the dataset.
But, yeah I got your point.
Will keep it in mind.

if funding wasn't concern, which path would you choose?

 If I had money in the bag. I would go with premium at first only . With several added cloud features.

what would make someone choose the paid versions?

 Mainly the features and ease of use.

What's stopping you from trying a community edition first?

 Yeah. I am deciding things. Maybe launching a community edition first is what I am going to do.

Would you regret keeping it closed more than opening it?

 Yes . I would regret it. But, I am going to release it in open.

Do you think gesture data tools need more openness to move the space forward?

 Yes ofcourse. There is a huge room here.

Thanks for putting the question out there openly. I've seen a few tools wrestle with this decision and honestly, full open source sounds great until you become the maintainer for every feature request and bug report.

Personally I'd lean toward a strong community edition first. You get adoption, feedback, and trust from builders without giving away every part of the business. If people genuinely love the product, open-sourcing more pieces later is always an option. Going the other direction is much harder.

 Thanks Nolan.
Will act accordingly .

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