Readit NewsIf you want your product to succeed, it must target decision-makers with a budget to buy your license, and it must make enough difference to them to justify the costs.
Most software libraries aren't products. They target other software developers who are not responsible for allocating funds. Furthermore, if there wasn't a library, most devs would absolutely love writing one ad hoc. Their salary would remain the same, had they been solving the problem from scratch (which most of us love doing) or adopting an existing one. It's the business people that would feel the difference, but business people don't understand the specifics of libraries. And they hate integrating closed-source parts into their codebase because it comes with tremendous risks should the vendor go belly up.
What could sell is a higher-level product that would automate boring/repetitive tasks that everyone hates. Like a GUI designer for some boilerplate stuff that everyone codes by hand (mind you many people like coding by hand, but some hate it and they will buy your GUI).
Your product can also be your consulting business. Don't add stuff based on everybody's requests for free. Make it open-source, welcome contributions, but if someone wants some specific stuff, give them a quote. From time to time, add commonly requested parts and write articles explaining how they work to gain visibility. You will have to deal with lots of entitled assholes, but you will also find people willing to pay you.
The poster, marak, is a founder [0]. They definitely understand product-ization. Yet two weeks ago they suffered an apartment fire and have been struggling to keep a roof over their head [1].
I can definitely understand the kind of bitterness that comes out of going through something like that only to realize how little the fellow humans around you really value you. Realizing that for all the positive signals (such as "popularity") you received before, precious few are willing to actually put resources on the line for you.
So, I think gp and marak aren't coming from a place of misunderstanding the world as it is, but rather a depressing understanding of our world.
Imagine, if you can, a much different world. A world where helping or recognizing the efforts of others meaningfully didn't put you worse off. A world where your quality of life wasn't determined by your ability to take more than you give (or to have started off with enough resources that you can afford to give more than you take).
Once you really see what could be, I think it's difficult to suffer what is.
[1] "I lost all my stuff in an apartment fire and am barely staying unhomeless." https://twitter.com/marak/status/1320465599319990272
This shows how much our old-school Unix tools need an update.
What if all the CLI tools had an option for JSON output and the shell natively supported a query language like `jq`. Then you could pipe commands together:
host -t A example.org --json-out | ping -c1 --json-in .arecords[0] --json-out | echo --json-in .[0].time > outputfile
[0] https://elv.sh/