Title should be "Building and app does not make you a VC BACKED startup" Also I fail to see why in that first half of the article you are saying people that have done their small little app or company aren't entitled to the same title as someone who was able to get a hundred thousand dollars from a man to trade his ownership for money. Then you go on to say how you have made a startup, and guess what, that startup is selling you bits of code.
If it's really about keeping people from reinventing the wheel, then give the wheel designs to everyone for free. If it's about selling code snippets to companies to turn a profit, best of luck to you.
PS: At the end of the reading, I didn't really get exactly why a small app team isn't a startup because they don't have the money.
I can reverse the same advice at you - just give your app away for free. What? you want to charge for it?
We try to create an incentive for people to share code - we publish both free and commercial code components, and we leave the licensing decisions to the authors. Who are you to say everyone must give their code away for free? their work has no value if it's not free? I'm a big fan of free open-source (cause really, who doesn't like to get stuff for free), but you shouldn't deride people who decide to make a business out of it.
In fact, I would argue that the code has more value from the application, since it can be used by others to create their own businesses. So why should it always be given away for free?
Many successful commercial open-source companies are the forefront of the open-source ecosystem (redhat, MySQL, Magento). They support it as much as free open-source does, and you need both for good balance.
Oh lets keep this straight, I don't begrudge you for making money and my good luck wish was not sarcastic at all. Nor am I deriding you for trying to sell a service. Just saying if you want to make money that's cool, just don't sell it like you are doing someone a personal favor when you aren't.
Don't make me out as one of the radical open sourcerors either. Many of the absolute best pieces of software are proprietary.
If it's really about keeping people from reinventing the wheel, then give the wheel designs to everyone for free. If it's about selling code snippets to companies to turn a profit, best of luck to you.
PS: At the end of the reading, I didn't really get exactly why a small app team isn't a startup because they don't have the money.