I resonate with this blog post a lot.

I think there is something to be said for monetizing ones' hobbies, but I've recently been taking some forays into this world of "build something amazing and give it away for free" as well. I recently took a very big experimental plunge in this path, and I'm curious how well it will work out for me.

Open-source state-of-the-art Magic: The Gathering card identification pipeline:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHieOcmC7Dw

I used to do this kind of image recognition for a living, but I've been out of the business for a little while now. I had some ideas for a different approach from what I've done in the past and decided to code it up. This version is far better than anything else I've ever done -- especially for scanning against busy backgrounds or with occlusions, and also for noticing fine differences between otherwise difficult-to-distinguish printings.

I didn't have any interested customers waiting for this, so -- much like the OP -- decided to create an experiment and release it open source. I'm not opposed to having paths to monetize it (for people who want to license it for closed-source commercial projects), but I'm not trying to commercialize it so much as I would love to see how far we can take it with open-source.

I don't know which path I should take with this.

The biggest downside is that I feel like I've had a hard time getting people to be as interested in this project as I would have expected -- I believe this truly is the best identification software available (I've built some benchmarks to test it [0]), and maybe the market is just a bit flooded for such things (?), but I suspect that one very strong problem is that if you don't charge for something, then there is a perceived lack of value.

Sometimes I wonder if I would have more interest in this project if I _weren't_ trying to give it away.

For me, that's been the most negative aspect about releasing this for free so far.

[0] - https://blog.hanclin.to/posts/gh-26/

Write some software, give it away for free