Remy is back! With some GPL and Deployment questions

Hi Mike & Chris,

Long time listener, but not as long nor famous as Eagon. Recently mailed in on a macro keyboard for debugging IDE shortcuts and back with a two-part question, advice. Both business wise and linux-deployment-hell wise. First a small intro.

I'm in the process of trying to sell my own GPL software. It's a small monitoring app written in Qt/C++. URL is https://www.leafnode.nl/, but I'm not perse looking for free advertisement, so it's up to you to mention it or not on air/show notes.

Price is low, not looking to make a profit, because that way I'm in a  gray legal area dutch-law wise and do not need a company. I hate exposing my private data in the public company register.

I'm not on a mobile app store yet, but the download includes an APK for Android. The app itself can export its source code, I've built that in so that even when the binary is distributed, users can still get the source code. A hypothetical scenario there is when it's up in the play store and I cannot send the source code to the user (as I can do now when they purchase).

Linux deployment-wise, I've made a script that builds an AppImage (after compiling Qt statically so I can compile the app statically) on Ubuntu 18.04. It works on most reasonably modern linuxes, Ubuntu 18.04 and up, and also Arch (my workstation runs arch).

For Windows, I've made a virtual machine running Windows 7, with the Qt deployment for Windows tools and an installer. Works fine on 7, 8, 10 and 11.

No Mac here sadly, so I cannot compile a Snow Leopard version for Mike.

On to the questions:

- Do you have tips for linux deployment, specifically for Qt. I've made snap packages before, but those are regarded as bad in the community since it's a canonical thing. Should I provide a .deb and .rpm in the download next to the appimage, is that worth the effort/time?

Most important question:

- What is (both of your) opinion on trying to sell GPL software? Not trying to make a living, just a little bump to cover the ongoing cost (hosting/domain, maybe Qt license if they stop changing the terms and pricing every week). I know Mike loves his viral GPL.


I did write up the adventure up to this point on my personal site:

- 3 https://raymii.org/s/blog/Existing_GPL_software_for_sale.html
- 2 https://raymii.org/s/articles/Embed_the_source_code_directly_in_your_Qt_app.html
- 1 https://raymii.org/s/blog/Selling_GPL_Software_part_1_lots_of_hurdles.html

Cheers, and still love the show. Sadly the meetup was too far away to fly from The Netherlands.
Remy