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I'm starting to feel some sorta way about open-core model as more of a marketing mechanism for lead gen. I can't put my finger on it and I'm not saying it's bad. It just kind of feels like it's like a free-trial that appeals to engineers, that helps jumpstart your marketing funnel top-end.

I'd love to hear Richard Stallman rant about this...he'd probably find a way to articulate, more elegantly, what I'm feeling.

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In our case, open-sourcing Chatwoot was pretty accidental.

You could read the story behind how we ended up doing that over here

https://www.chatwoot.com/blog/woot-journals-one-year-since-o...

I like to think of open source as solving a real problem for people and saving them a lot of time for free, otherwise they wouldn't use it. This often does have the effect of creating demand for complementary services that solve even more problems and save even more time, or even opening up whole new markets like Docker did with LXC.

Anyone considering the addition of open source to their stack should also consider the downsides such as cost of fork and technological lock-in in addition to the benefits, and based on the rapid adoption of open source over the past decade I'd say it's a pretty good trade-off in a lot of cases.

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