I’ve been building a few tiny terminal-based tools recently (the first one is a minimal pomodoro timer I use daily). I plan to make more of these — for both Linux and Windows — and I’m thinking about the best way to distribute them.
Here is an example with my current tool:
GitHub as landing page: https://github.com/Mietkiewski/MPomidoro
Gumroad for packaged builds PWYW: https://mietkiewski.gumroad.com/l/mpomidoro
I’m curious how Linux users feel about this kind of distribution. Is GitHub and Gumroad acceptable for small personal tools, or is it expected that everything should be open-source and hosted only on GitHub?
If you’re not going to show the source code, there’s absolutely no point in using GitHub.
As for getting paid, I hadn’t seen gumroad before, nice, but failing the access to the source, it’s unlikely I’d buy/pay for unknown software and install it sight unseen on anything I care about.
From a security perspective, in my opinion this is a disaster waiting to happen.
Especially for a timer? It could be the best timer in the world and I still wouldn’t pay for it because anyone with the tiniest bit of programming experience could make something good enough in like an hour