The obvious choice is to sell it like a service, but this has been tried before and is a hard road if you aren't backed by venture capital. The most valuable part, syncing, is something I could sell as an add-on but would require a step up in the server department than what I have now. Probably I would need a full time employee only keeping tabs on servers (for starters).

The real question is: “Do I want to look after other people’s data for a living?” No, I don’t. I would like to develop the code, squash the bugs and fine-tune the algorithms, but not run it as a service.

Is there a middle ground? Sell it like a closed source framework and let the clients take care of their own servers? No, I don't think I could get anyone jump that train.

Open source feels like a nice thing to do. Give back to the community and perhaps also get some help or at least bug reports. The fear is that if successful, this turns into a massive unpaid job. And if unsuccessful, well then it’s just pointless.

It's decision time, so what should I choose? Let's insert a dramatic pause... Well, it's decided! I'll give it away as open source! Including sync for everyone to implement their own way to store data. Since I don't have investors (nor the time to devote into converting users) it won't become a big success. It might help someone and wouldn't that just be great?

Go here for all the details https://github.com/AutoDB/autoDB