Iāve been experimenting with building very small personal tools to help myself stay focused. One of them is a tiny terminalābased Pomodoro timer.
For this project Iām trying a different distribution model: itās closedāsource in the licensing sense, but the code is sourceāavailable. The actual download with code is on Gumroad, where Iām testing a payāwhatāyouāwant model 0$+.
In this setup, GitHub works more like a landing page / documentation hub rather than a place where the full source lives.
Since Iām still learning how to distribute tiny solo tools in a way that feels āfairā and reasonable, Iām curious how other developers see this approach:
Is using GitHub as a landing page acceptable when the code isnāt hosted there?
Does PWYW 0$+ make sense for small, simple tools?
How do you usually distribute your own microāprojects?
For context, hereās the project Iām experimenting with:
I personally find it weird and confusing when I see things like this. There are loads of closed source projects that use GitHub purely for issue tracking and feature requests and it just kind of feels against the ethos of it. Honestly for those projects Iām not really interested anyway if it is closed so after a quick browse in the org repos to see if I missed something, I just leave.
In your case it seems even stranger, if you wanted to have a landing page in GitHub but nothing else then why not have it as an GitHub Pages website rather than a repo?
I didnāt know GitHub Pages was a thing for this use case. Iāll look into it ā it might be a better fit for future projects.
Well in that it serves a free website rather than just being a bare repo. Still donāt think it fits exactly but its better.
I assume itās not against GitHub terms, but I find it inappropriate and unfitting. Smells like marketing for discoverability with no content, just forwarding. Which is a thing of course, but if youāre asking me as a developer and personally, Iād prefer the project not do that. A repo as a pure landing page uses nothing of what makes a repo a repo.
If itās a developer creating their portfolio and linking their distributed projects to their developer profile, I think I can see some value in that. But in that case, all of them should be in one repo.
Fair point ā I get where youāre coming from. Iām still experimenting with distribution, so this setup isnāt final. GitHub Pages might be a cleaner option, Iāll check it out.
