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Comment by la64710 | Hacker News Reader

What is the reason for “open sourcing” this , when any meaningful implementation is locked away behind services and is closed source. I just think these kind of use cases confuses users. There is no problem in being closed source and proprietary (unless you are using preexisting open source code and open sourcing those parts of your code makes it legally compliant) . In any case it is confusing at best and misleading at the worst.

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Free advertising on Haker News. 10 bucks net profit without any grows is also profitable. Getting to the main page of HN was worth open sourcing what had no potential anyway.

This is my reasoning, I'm not the creator of this.

Username checks out.

As someone that built a 20m ARR survey product... The only difference between this and something making millions is a sales team.

And millions in bots and fake reviews.

it wasn't needed in our case. Selling B2B didn't require online reviews of our product.

I think maybe you're being overly cynical (yes yes, I did see your username!)

Sometimes, large companies open-source a SaaS product because they expect to make more money from the free marketing (See yesterdays post about headline-driven development) even though their implementation remains closed.

We still give them news-space, don't we? Why should we act any differently for solo developers?

I see that the project appears to depend on Mongo and Redis, both non-open source. However, both have substantially compatible alternatives that a user should use in their place. Even if they did not, having the source code available under an open source license means that users can fork it and swap these databases out for something better. Users can learn from and modify the source code for their own uses. Users can review the source code for quality and security. All of these things are possible when the code is open source. So yeah, it would be nice if it used open source dependencies or at least officially supported alternative open source dependencies, making the application open source as is is still a win over keeping it proprietary.

There are organizations (often not small) that will pay for a hosted and closed source solution if it is available under dual license in case it goes away.

Other organizations still, have open source only policies, or no open source at all.

Many of these applications can be in government.

It can increase the footprint.

What organizations have a no open source policy? They would be hard pressed to find any significant commercial software that doesn't have an open source dependency somewhere it its dependency chain!

Oh, they exist. Imagine Microsoft based companies that must have commercial licensing with software that guarantees to work or is secure.

I know of some CMS’ which were dual licensable for this reason.

Other reasons why:

https://www.channelfutures.com/connectivity/reasons-organiza...

Umm, Microsft software uses a lot of open source dependancies.

Not Microsoft themselves, but organizations which use Microsoft.

> when any meaningful implementation is locked away behind services and is closed source.

As someone seeking a purely open source forms solution, what do you mean by this?

Not the commenter you replied to, but I noticed that it depends on Redis and Mongo, which are proprietary database products. However, there are Redis and Mongo mostly-compatible DBs that are Open Source, so you can probably swap them in (though the project may not officially support them and test with them, so you may have to be willing to contribute testing and bug fixes yourself).

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