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?
I dislike it. Usually I’d use packages from my Linux distribution. Or package it myself and maybe upstream the effort if my distro has a user repository. Now (this way) it’s down to everybody download random files from the internet and execute them. Specifically what every Linux tutorial instructs you not to do. Plus there’s no security updates, no version control or transparency. It’s not licensed in any free way…
But it’s your software project. You’re perfectly fine to do whatever you want with it.