TBH the author asked for feedback and I provided it.
There’s a ton of work that’s OSS. There’s also a ton of work that’s not.
This is a tool that I’d happily pay double the amount that they’re asking if it was OSS. I also regularly fund OSS maintainers.
Heck I’d even be fine with a closed source by default, but pay to get source code access too.
And I welcome the feedback, even if I probably won’t follow it. If everyone thought like you do, then it’d be far nicer to publish the code and maybe charge for support. I’m fairly confident that not enough people feel the same way to make it work.
As to pricing, I need to be able to financially justify the time spent working on the app, and the price is one that I hope will let me do that.
I would love for you to make the code source available if you pay.
Or are you worried about people stealing and making pirated copies?
If the code were available I would 100% expect that someone else would distribute a binary with the paywalled features unlocked and that my original version would be relegated to secondary.
I know you could make the argument “the right license wouldn’t allow that”, but that would only be enforced if you follow up through the courts, perhaps internationally. I just can’t be doing with the hassle unfortunately.