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Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Luckily this is one decision I'll never have to make if we ever fail and shutdown. All of our code is Open Source, ASLv2 licensed, and has been from day 0. Well, OK, maybe not a few internal tools and things, but all of our product code is OSS already, on GitHub and ready to go.

We consider this a strong selling point to our current prospects, actually. There's no fear of vendor lock-in, they can kick us out tomorrow and get a new vendor to support them, they have 100% freedom to modify the code and tailor it to their needs if we don't provide what they need, and - if we close up shop - they have options for future support, whether it means supporting it themselves, or paying someone else to do it. But access to the code will never be a problem.

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Well, that's great and all but be careful not to be to flippant about it.

It's a very different business model, with different advantages and disadvantages that are very hard to compare directly. It's not an easy decision to make.

My current project was Closed Source for a year and a half and has now been Open Source for a year.

Open Source was always something I thought about, and sometimes people asked, but the thing that made me flip over was the realisation one morning after some bad sales meetings that with either a Open Source or Closed Source project, making a project that users both actually want and you can get some money for was very hard work, and if I was going to do all that work anyway I may as well do the one I personally preferred.

So I Open Sourced it, and I feel I did so from a position of strength. It's been a great year for the project, and I don't regret it.

I've also been on the flip side of that; Open Sourcing a project from a position of weakness. We had talked about Open Sourcing it from the start but never did, then the project never took off and in the final stages before we finally killed it we Open Sourced it. It never gave us or anyone else that I know off any benefit, and was a waste of time.

Thanks nirvdrum for a honest and good post - I'm actually talking about Open Sourcing my project in a week and would like to quote your blog - with a link and credit, of course. Good luck for the future ...

By all means, quote away. Writing this was cathartic for me. If it helps others, even better.

Plus 100 for this. I've (after one year of business) open sourced my software and this was one of the better moves in my 5 years business history.

This opened a lot of doors for me.

Awesome. I think I could have made this more likely by going more service-oriented from the outset. It was a Rails prototype app that kept growing. Eventually new stuff was service-oriented, but far too much was locked up in a monolithic Rails app. In any event, that would have allowed me to still outsource some of the view stuff to proprietary software while being able to open up the core of it. C'est la vie.

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