You say that your competitors are better at PR. Have you analyzed your growth and PR strategies?
What is your competitive positioning? Are you cheaper? Are there fundamental technological advances that you have that make you innately better?
Here is a cheat sheet that is sort of the standard when it comes to competitive strategy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_five_forces_analysis
That may not totally apply and you may be in a situation where you could easily justify hiring, depending on the income of the business, but it'll start you down what's probably a much better path than you're on now.
I know it's frustrating to ask how to do X and get told about how to do Y. However, I will say this: You describe some problems, then ask if open sourcing will work, and to be honest, I honestly have no idea why you think that problems connects with that solution. The average open source project crawls in a corner and dies. I think you'd be trading some admittedly long odds for some much longer ones.