If I'm being perfectly honest, it never even occurred to me to consider the open source route. I'm not opposed to open source at all--I've done in the past--but one issue could be that I might loose the ability to be highly opinionated about the evolution of the product, and I think in this space where there are already a ton of "do a lot of things halfway decently" products, being opinionated about what Lunette is and is not could be key to its success.
> but one issue could be that I might loose the ability to be highly opinionated about the evolution of the product
I hate to be that person, but you're pitching an app for authors, developed by yourself who is a self-described author, and you're mixing up 'loose' and 'lose' :-(
In any other context, this wouldn't matter, and with actual typos it wouldn't matter, but in this context with this particular word, it does reflect negatively.
> I think in this space where there are already a ton of "do a lot of things halfway decently" products, being opinionated about what Lunette is and is not could be key to its success.
You're quite correct. Having a narrow focus on the goal is better than trying to be all things to all people, otherwise sooner or later you're going to be fielding requests from people who used it to write the business docs and need non-book related features.
I am also doing something similar (am not really an author, made a few hundred dollars with self-published books and short stories a decade ago and then moved on), and I have an even narrower focus than you do.
Every time you see a project with a rejected feature request, issue or patch, that's the project leader exercising their leadership.
Open Source means that if someone is determined enough, they can go do it for themselves. Sometimes that ends up with a viable alternative -- neovim, for instance -- and sometimes it demonstrates that a rejected feature was actually useful, and is folded back in to the original -- but most of the time it means a copy of the code base with one patch and one user. All of these are valuable in different ways.
