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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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I’d probably start with open core.

If adoption and community trust matter, open source the part that helps individual builders get value quickly. Then charge for the parts teams actually need- collaboration, support, export workflows, integrations, security, and scale.

Free users can help you find the real use cases. Paying teams will tell you what is worth turning into a product.

 Thanks NIpun, Thanks for the feedback. I think I would go with this direction now.

Open core sounds like the strongest middle ground: free for individuals and contributors, paid team features, integrations, and support. Developers love open source—right up until open source needs to pay the developer’s grocery bill 😄

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