What should Tool become — open source or with community Edition?
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.
Replies
@sundar_balamurugan what's your biggest fear with going fully open source?
@lee_jay1 No fear . I am planning to go Community + Opensource first. Then see how it takes off.
The thing that I am still thinking is about is monetization ways if I go opensource. But, yeah let me worry about that at later stage.
@sundar_balamurugan What feedback have you heard the most from early users?
@paritosh_kumar_mandal Yeah, Got some feedback for the first version. Mostly good and some place for improvements.
@sundar_balamurugan Do you think companies and individuals need different versions?
@hambali_salisu Not at the first. But, later down the road- they might need
what would make someone choose the paid versions?
@bradywilfaqn Mainly the features and ease of use.
Thanks for putting the question out there openly. I've seen a few tools wrestle with this decision and honestly, full open source sounds great until you become the maintainer for every feature request and bug report.
Personally I'd lean toward a strong community edition first. You get adoption, feedback, and trust from builders without giving away every part of the business. If people genuinely love the product, open-sourcing more pieces later is always an option. Going the other direction is much harder.
@nolan_vu Thanks Nolan.
Will act accordingly .
@sundar_balamurugan IIf you launched it paid tomorrow, who do you think would buy first?
@pablo_ani Yeah, I never thought about launching paid in the first stage. I am talking Opensource vs community edition with paid one. I may have phrased it wrong in the forum. But, yeah let us see .
@pablo_ani @sundar_balamurugan Community plus open source makes sense for the code, but I think gesture data needs a separate trust model. If contributors record their hands or signing, I’d make consent, permitted uses, deletion, and the dataset license explicit at capture and export rather than assume the app’s GPL license covers the samples. That governance may matter more to adoption than the paid-versus-community split.
@pablo_ani @eduard_turea Thanks for the comment Eduard.
We are not capturing the data and users don't contribute with the dataset.
But, yeah I got your point.
Will keep it in mind.
I’d go open core / community edition. The core labeling workflow should probably be open, especially because researchers and CV teams will want to inspect, trust, and adapt the dataset pipeline. That will help adoption much faster than a fully paid tool.
But the commercial layer can still make sense around team features: collaboration, dataset versioning, advanced exports, QA/review flows, cloud sync, integrations, and support.
In short: make the core useful and trustworthy for the community, then charge for the workflows that serious teams rely on.
@kryptonite_wei Thank you Xinyuanwei.
That's what I am working towards. Thank you.
As someone who works with ML tooling, i instantly trust open-source projects more because i can inspect how everything works. But I'd still pay for priority support or features that save my team hours every week.
@rose_florean Thanks Rose.
Will keep it in mind.
My instinct would be community-first, but with a very clear commercial path from day one. For a gesture dataset tool, trust and adoption matter a lot because researchers and builders will want to inspect the pipeline, understand export formats, and adapt it to their own model workflows. Open source can help there. The paid layer could come later around team workflows: dataset versioning, QA checks, collaboration, managed storage, or support for companies building production recognition systems. One practical question: who is the user you most want to learn from first, individual ML builders or teams collecting datasets at scale? That answer probably decides the model more than the license itself.
@rahulbhavsar Understood.
Will move out in this direction now.
@sundar_balamurugan Do you think gesture data tools need more openness to move the space forward?
@colesimmons05 Yes ofcourse. There is a huge room here.