There's competition in every market, non-profits included. Even though we're not trying to compete for dollars (necessarily) in that we hope to help "grow the pie," we are competing for attention. Anyway, that's probably another discussion.
> If someone else came in and used your "core business code" to make something which was then helpful to other people, that would be a good thing, right?
Of course! My hunch is that that the existing open source systems out there that do the crowdfunding thing would suffice. Catarse[1] is one I can think of off the top of my head. I looked into using it for Watsi but decided it wasn't going to work. My point is is that there is already software out there like ours. The fact that someone could use ours as a base is nice, but not motivation enough to open it up. Are crowdfunding platforms going to become the new CMS? It might already be happening.
> A sort of "in-kind" donation of their time and energy and expertise, right?
Yes, and we are already leveraging that, just selectively. Everything takes time, especially managing open source software. Even though the tools have gotten much better (does anybody remember what life was like before Githug, et al?) it doesn't mean the cost of managing the contributions have gone down to zero. We want to leverage energy where we can, but in a way that works for us. Open sourcing our code doesn't necessarily feel like the right approach to me.