The issue here is that you are trying to bridge two disparate goals - making money and helping kids.
The fact that this isn’t open source, as it stands, means the latter is not a primary goal - which is not an indictment, just an observation.
The complaints will come, regardless, for that reason alone, given the marketing/narrative.
You’re selling a product to parents/educators who want to gamify the technical education of their children. That market, small as it is, despises micro transactions.
A sustainable business has the capacity to help a lot more kids than an unfinished open source project that never gets released on iOS because no one wants to pay the developer fee.
This isn’t “HackVille by Zynga,” it’s an indie dev trying to make a product they believe in. I hope it succeeds and inspires more high quality edutainment.
My point is that packaging the app in such a way as to put off your target audience is inherently unsustainable business.
I agree with that criticism, and I'd encourage the dev to iterate on non-micro-transaction monetization schemes. The part I disagree with is that a profit motive is antithetical to helping kids.
It'd be nice if we had robust, no-strings attached funding streams to make this kind of content, but we don't, so if we want it to exist, consumers need to pay for it.
You're not arguing against the GP but for the same thing from different angles. They're saying the approach is fighting the goal, while you're just saying "I hope they're successful".
I was responding to the claim that making money is in tension with helping kids learn.
I think it’s fair to claim that a large enterprise will eventually crank the money dial to maximum extraction. But a solo dev is free to follow their conscience and make money in a responsible way.
I don’t like the “pay per hint” model as currently implemented, but I’m willing to give the developer the benefit of the doubt that they didn’t think it all the way through.
What does open sourcing an application have to do with helping kids?
There are plenty of arguments for open sourcing things. “Closed source apps necessarily deprioritize helping children” is not an obvious argument to me. Can you draw the connection more explicitly?
Scale and accessibility - Eliminating any barriers for children to get access to education, etc.
Not to mention, it’s an app trying to help kids get exposed to underpinning technologies - seeing how the game itself is made would be optimizing for that end.
It’s not that closed source deprioritizes, but the “helping kids” were the sole and primary goal sought, there’s a clear answer to what would align with that.
All said, it’s not a critique of the OP - reconciling ideals and practical reality often require trade offs that would allow for a project like this to happen in the first place.
I think it's hugely important to eliminate barriers to get access to education, which is why there's a free, web-based version of Hacktivate that is already being used 350+ schools around the world.
I also think there's a lot of people out there who would pay to have Hacktivate running offline, using the full power of their device, and with no external resources being required, so I made that too.
Suggesting that I need to make them open source to prove I want to help kids learn is really strange, particularly when literally thousands of students around the world are benefitting from my work without paying a cent.
As mentioned, no indictment, and you don’t need to prove anything - helping kids learns is clearly a goal.
But so too is making money off the iOS app, correct?