Should you open source your startup?

It’s hard enough to build a company from scratch; don’t make it harder. Your team should actually view open source as a liability, in the financial sense: You’ve made a commitment (usually implicit) to your community that you’re going to spend money indefinitely to make sure this software gets better and better.

Can you profit from open source?

The most common way to get revenue from OSS is to provide paid support. MySQL, the leading open source database, derives revenue from selling support subscriptions for their product. Paid support is an effective tool for making profit from open source for a few reasons.

Why do companies go open source?

If a developer has been using your company’s open source code for years, they are more likely to want to join your company and continue using that code. An open source project is one of the most effective ways to attract tech talent, and a far better job advertisement than a traditional job posting.

Why should we open source?

Open source licensing encourages innovation through collaboration. Without it, many of the technologies we take for granted today would never have developed, or would be locked away behind patent law. The open source movement is the reason that technology has developed at such a breakneck pace for the past few decades.

Who pays open source?

Ultimately, open source sustains itself through contributions from people all over the world, and that’s bigger than any one company or location. Getting paid to work on open source is a rare and wonderful opportunity, but you should not have to give up your passion in the process.

Is open source bad?

Open Source Often Suffers Delays and a Glacial Development Pace. Many open source projects seem to suffer from a slow development pace, where new versions are endlessly delayed, new features come slowly if ever, and it’s difficult to prioritize difficult-but-important features.

How do people earn from open source?

There is already a cohort of open-source software companies, some of which are public, that are surpassing $100M (or even $1B) in annual revenue: RedHat, Cloudera / Hortonworks (Hadoop), MuleSoft, Automattic (WordPress), Elastic, MongoDB, Acquia (Drupal), Hashicorp, Confluent (Kafka), Databricks (Spark), and more.