AgathaTheWitch

I've been working on a library for a while and I've come up with a way to monetize it by making a web frontend for it. With a bit of marketing I think it could make some money (not a lot, maybe ~$10,000 a year given my sense of the rather niche market) I want to know what are the practical steps you take with this sort of business.

Do I have to form a company? Should I be patenting and trademarking logos and stuff? If I just make a website and start taking payments, what are the tax and legal implications? My library is Apache v2 licensed but I imagine the frontend / service would be proprietary. I heard I should consider switching the library to MIT.

I am planning to move abroad in a few months so I don't really want to start a company in the United States. I've just never created a paid service before so I'm really naive about how to go about it. If anyone has experience here or a good link, I'd appreciate it.

I have been a professional software developer for four years now and must confess, I have never made a website. Mostly I have done systems engineering (Deployment, security, database infrastructure) but also some QA work and Java app development.

I wrote a fiction book in my spare time and would like to create a site to promote it and possibly develop the IP into other products. I already have a domain. The thing is, there are so many ways to create websites. I want a framework that is easy to use but also not too cookie-cutter. I've heard good things about Squarespace.

My best languages are Python, Java, and Ruby. Pretty solid with Unix (I've written hundreds of BASH scripts) and I wouldn't mind writing HTML and CSS if necessary. I know Javascript a bit too.

Anyway what do you folks recommend?