Comment by beck5 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beck5 | Hacker News Reader

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We did exactly this with ShareLaTeX.com (https://github.com/sharelatex) we are a bootstrapped SASS business that started a couple of years ago and now supports 3 people full time.

We have open sourced 95% of our code, which gives people a really great product they can install on their own servers. Along with our hosted version, we have a premium self hosted version with a few things that only the big users would want. I would not personally want to build my business around support/contracts as it is really pretty close to being a contractor.

We were already an established company before we open sourced so I can not speak for how many users it got us. I don't think its foolish todo but at the same time it is not going to make your business.

Be aware open sourcing will add extra burden to everything you do. But starting open source is going to be easier than doing it retrospectively.

discourse.org started life open source and they are doing very well but have some big hitters and finance.

ShareLaTeX is awesome - thanks for creating such a cool service.

I'm interested to hear more of the story.

How long did it take to start making money?

Do many people download and install?

Have you ever felt concerned you'd be forked by competition?

Where does the income come from primarily?

We didn't start charging until we had been live for about 10 months, this is where it went from a cool side project to realising that we had something here. Once we started charging we were making a tiny amount of money straight away because we already had a lot of users.

A lot of people do run their own versions, these are generally universities who do not want their data going to 3rd parties. Its impossible for us to get exact numbers on it though.

We were worried about other people stealing our code, some other people do run our site however your self hosted version is always going to be best, it will have all the SEO, more users, get the updates quickest.

Most of our income is via self hosted.

Do you have any qualms about having the name of the open source project in your company name?

How did the LaTeX project owner feel about the project name being in your company name? Did it ever come up?

How does open source add extra burden to everything?

If we want to change things we have to think about what effect it will have on everyone else. Backwards compatibility becomes a bigger issue. People run ShareLaTeX in all sorts of different setups and environments which our changes can conflict with.

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