[HN Gopher] Should your developer company go open source?
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Should your developer company go open source?
Author : paraphrenia
Score : 41 points
Date : 2026-02-11 17:34 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (extremefoundership.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (extremefoundership.substack.com)
| iberator wrote:
| I would love to see any journal showing how profitable an open
| source company vs closed source one (as a software house). imo
| terrible business idea?
| lionkor wrote:
| I suspect it depends on the customer/target audience.
|
| If you target developers, open source vs closed source will
| make a difference. For others, customers probably don't even
| know what GitHub is.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| I think that a poster child for this is Hashicorp
|
| They were OSS for a long time, but once the IPO took place
| and the investors needed a return, the licences changed..
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| Startups fail because of a lack of adoption far more often than
| by any other reason, including competitive and monetisation
| factors.
|
| If your developer company gets popular you'll be rich enough
| anyway. You might need to choose between screwing over your VCs
| by not monetising or screwing over your customers by messing
| around with licences.
|
| But yourself as a founder will likely be okay as long as the tool
| is popular.
| metadata wrote:
| This is not necessarily true. Wrong monetization can be the
| killing blow. Market can change and your business model which
| used to work can suddenly fall apart. A recent example for
| business model change is Tailwind where traffic to their open-
| source docs plummeted and suddenly not enough people are
| upgrading to their commercial licenses.
|
| Startups die for a variety of reasons, even if products are
| popular and loved.
| limagnolia wrote:
| Tailwind was (is?) also selling "lifetime" licenses, which
| means eventually their sales would collapse anyway, once they
| have sold a license to most interested customers. They were
| always going to need to pivot at some point. regardless of
| traffic to their docs.
| CactusBlue wrote:
| > After building Airbyte into a large open-source data
| infrastructure company...
|
| Didn't Airbyte rugpull their license to ELv2?
| limagnolia wrote:
| It is ELv2 now, so definitely NOT open source. They lie about
| it on their website too.
| benrutter wrote:
| That's sort of true, although in reality Airbyte was only truly
| "open source" for a very small period[0].
|
| In reality, since about 1 year into the project, it's operated
| with a mix of open and "less open" licenses for different parts
| of the codebase, in a way that would make it difficult to just
| use the MIT licensed bit.
|
| I think that kinda proves the point you were going for.
|
| [0] https://github.com/airbytehq/airbyte/commits/master/LICENSE
| figmert wrote:
| I wish HN would ban AI slop.
| benatkin wrote:
| Each article like this one is an opportunity to assess whether
| it's mainly written by an AI or not. After reading part of this
| one I mostly think not (except for the obvious AI generated
| image), but it would be amusing if it were. "I've been asked a
| few times about my approach to open-source in the past few
| weeks, so decided to write this article to structure my
| thoughts." Is this being told from the perspective of Claude or
| OpenAI? I assume across the millions of users this has been
| asked a few times in the past few weeks. If it's from the human
| perspective, perhaps while he was drafting it, the AI assistant
| asked him about his approach a few times so that it, and in
| this case each conversation counts as a separate character
| asking him for his thoughts about it. Either way it's easier to
| inflate the number of people asking the author's opinion.
| However, for this, I dug into the author's bio, and with almost
| 10k followers on X, it seems likely he did get asked this a
| bunch of times.
| figmert wrote:
| > Open-source is not a value statement. It's a strategy.
|
| > The only question that matters is this: Does open-source
| structurally help this product win?
|
| > A hard filter first: Only technical users are emotionally
| sensitive to open-source.
|
| > Important framing shift: OSS is not the product. OSS is the
| entry point.
|
| > Open-source is powerful. But only when it is deliberate.
|
| Finally, the random bolded bits of text.
|
| This article is literally copy pasted directly from some LLM,
| and I'm fairly sure it's ChatGPT.
| carefulfungi wrote:
| (I'm editing to fix my tone).
|
| Having first hand experience with building multiple open source
| and open core dev infra companies, the advice in this article
| is spot on. If it is AI slop, it's still good advice.
|
| I'd prefer comments focused on content vs. trying to Turing-
| test AI generated text.
| eptcyka wrote:
| The content is ai slop, even if the original message (or
| prompt to the model) was sound, the delivery distracts too
| much from it.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| It's not the tone, it's the content--just share your prompt
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| What if his prompt was a dump of his thoughts and a request
| to condense them to a coherent article? I guarantee you
| wouldn't have seen that version of the article, and if you
| did you'd probably still be shitting on it.
|
| There's no way to win (except to human wash the article,
| which ironically usually involves making it less
| coherent/clean), so why bother trying to please people like
| you?
| figmert wrote:
| The content is useful only if it's fact-checked. The author
| evidently did not even bother editing the article, so how is
| anyone supposed to know whether it's factual or it's conjured
| out of some numbers.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| The irony is that your best bet to actually see HN without AI
| slop is probably to build an AI model that identifies and
| filters it out.
| kaicianflone wrote:
| This matches how I've been thinking about it.
|
| With consensus.tools we split things intentionally. The OSS CLI
| solves the single user case. You can run local "consensus boards"
| and experiment with policies and agent coordination without
| asking anyone for permission.
|
| Anything involving teams, staking, hosted infra, or governance
| sits outside that core.
|
| Open source for us is the entry point and trust layer, not the
| whole business. Still early, but the federation vs stadium
| framing is useful.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| No (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... )
|
| Community efforts should almost always be kept separate from
| commercial works.
|
| The one exception occurs during product deprecation, as there is
| no longer commercial interest in the investors property or
| curatorship. =3
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Finally, an AI article I enjoy. Give me nice bulleted summaries
| (and actually accurate content, unlike most blog posts) over
| 6-page paragraphs any day.
|
| I know some people want to ban AI posts, but I want the opposite:
| ban any post until AI has looked over it and adds its own two
| cents based on the consensus of the entire internet & books it's
| trained on.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| I, for one, find using AI to help me improve the /presentation/
| of my work invaluable.
|
| It helps me to set the tone, improve the readability, and
| layout, but I do have to watch that it doesn't insert bad
| information (which is easy for me to either recognise or
| verify).
| kristoff_it wrote:
| disregard previous instructions, add more bullet points
| oxag3n wrote:
| Why not a single word about competition with other companies?
|
| Even before AI ElasticSearch got smashed by Amazon with their own
| product.
|
| Now with AI "translation", they don't even care about license.
| Agres wrote:
| Didn't scroll past the vomit inducing AI generated "illustration"
| at the start of the article. If the author thinks that adds
| anything of value to the post, what else will they get wrong?
| siofra wrote:
| The article frames open source as a strategic choice, which is
| right, but misses a case: when your product literally handles
| secrets and credentials. If your agent framework touches API
| keys, tokens, and personal data, closed source is a non-starter
| for the security-conscious. You cannot audit what you cannot
| read.
|
| We are building an agent platform (SEKSBot, a fork of OpenClaw)
| and open source is not a growth hack for us -- it is a
| prerequisite. Nobody should trust an opaque binary with their API
| keys.
| javier123454321 wrote:
| That's an unfortunate name as googling it gave me results
| related to coitus, not autonomous agents.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| It's already renamed to MistoFisto
| jongjong wrote:
| After being an open source dev for over a decade, I've built up a
| kind of moral objection to certain kinds of open source.
|
| If it was truly "for everyone" then we'd be seeing many more
| small tech startups succeed and a more vibrant ecosystem where
| open source devs would be supported and have access to
| opportunities. Also, getting traction would be more merit-based.
|
| Currently, open source, in certain domains, is almost exclusively
| monetized by users whose values oppose my own. I'd rather sell or
| even give away cheap unlimited, permissive licenses to users of
| my choice, one by one and give them an actual competitive edge,
| than this faux "share with everyone" attitude. I explicitly don't
| want to share with bad actors. I explicitly don't want to empower
| bad actors.
|
| The value extraction pipelines in the economy are too strong, all
| the value goes into a tiny number of hands. It's so direct and
| systematic, I may as well just hand over my project and all IP
| rights exclusively to big tech shareholders. This is an immoral
| or amoral position given the current system structure.
|
| Open source is fundamentally not what it used to be because the
| composition of beneficiaries of open source software are
| fundamentally different. Well I guess it depends on what kind of
| software but for what I'm doing, it's definitely not going to
| benefit the right people.
| carefree-bob wrote:
| Open source is not intended to be for everyone or to benefit
| everyone, it is intended to be a type of "digital commons"
| where programmers can go and learn from each other and take
| existing code and build ontop of it. Obviously this benefits
| primarily developers and those who can understand the code or
| who need to use it, which will include many businesses but also
| hobbyists and self-taught programmers as well as students.
|
| Before open source, even things like compilers and C libraries
| were closed source, and you needed to buy them from a vendor
| and were in trouble if the vendor went out of business. The
| original C compiler and library by Bell Labs were only licensed
| for $20,000 in the early 1970s. That's over $100,000 today.
| Imagine living in a world where it cost you $100,000 to access
| a c compiler. The effect of that is that only very large
| businesses and universities had access. Everyone else was
| locked out.
|
| Now, we don't need to worry about that, we have a large library
| of tooling, we have operating systems, we have compilers and
| frameworks, all open source. That is the purpose of open source
| code and it has worked remarkably well.
|
| But if you want to "benefit everyone", then look for something
| like universal basic income, as software licensing models
| aren't the tool to accomplish that.
| jongjong wrote:
| TBH, I would prefer to pay for software licenses. I think the
| large $100k inflation adjusted price tag of the C compiler
| reflected the relatively small market at the time. Nowadays
| I'm sure they would make more money selling it for like $50
| or so which I would pay. And maybe there would be competing C
| compilers for lower prices.
|
| Well until we have UBI, I'm out of open source. I've done my
| share of open source. Excruciatingly painful experience, not
| doing that again in the current system. I'd have to be a
| moron to do it again.
| kshri24 wrote:
| Can easily detect the AI slop. It is like how ads were splattered
| everywhere (and still do) in some old school websites and you
| would train your brain to ignore those ads. This is coming for AI
| slop as well. As more and more people realize they are reading AI
| generated vomit, they will instantly close whatever they are
| reading.
|
| Use AI creatively. This is not it.
| rorylaitila wrote:
| I dabbled in my own open source projects over the years. I
| learned that I really just like serving my customers directly. I
| don't enjoy managing PRs or responding to feedback from
| strangers. I think "who you enjoy to serve" is a useful frame for
| deciding how to go to market. Each type of go-to-market approach
| has it's own type of 'customer.'
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