[troika]

Very true. I guess there's also the angle of alleviating third party risks if you're running a PaaS/IaaS offering. By open sourcing your core you give clients something to fall back upon if your company gets bought/goes bust etc. This might result in a competitive advantage over proprietary only competitors.

[gregmac]

> By open sourcing your core you give clients something to fall back upon if your company gets bought/goes bust etc. This might result in a competitive advantage over proprietary only competitors.

I work on a proprietary product (SaaS + on-prem models), but this is also a very strong consideration for us in choosing basically anything we use (whether part of the product or part of our infrastructure).

If you're a small shop and not open source, unless you're literally the only option (or you're trivially replaced by a dozen other products), you're basically ruled out, unfortunately. This includes SaaS stuff.

It's not that we don't have the money, it's we don't have the risk tolerance. If you disappear, or get purchased and stop offering your product, or decide not to fix our bugs because they're too niche to us, I don't want to be hung out to dry.

[nickpsecurity]

" it's we don't have the risk tolerance. If you disappear, or get purchased and stop offering your product, or decide not to fix our bugs because they're too niche to us, I don't want to be hung out to dry."

Lots of examples. Convergent's CTOS, OpenVMS temporarily, QNX's "open" source, most desktop OS's, many commercial compilers, and recently FoundationDB I had hopes for. I simply don't use something commercial unless I can export the data out of it easily to an OSS alternative that I have ready-to-go. Also need to regularly export and test that data as the closures or licensing changes sometimes happen without warning.