1. What's the business model that uses open source?
2. Yes, I have an opinion. Fooling around with open sourcing the project is easier than shipping something useful and finding users and engaging with them. Until a significant fraction of people care about the project, nobody cares whether it's open source.
3. Open sourcing a project is not a road to free labor. Building a community of users is a potential way to garner useful pull requests. But a community of users comes first.
4. Generally, my impression is that building a community of open source users is harder than finding customers for a business.
Think in steps.
Get 10 users, make em happy.
Ask yourself how to get to 50, if no answer look at possible marketing campaign, open sourcing is one option for a marketing campaign
Thanks for the advice, that is a clever way to think about user-acquisition, breaking it down into smaller parts.
We will try this once the next beta is ready!
2. Yes, I have an opinion. Fooling around with open sourcing the project is easier than shipping something useful and finding users and engaging with them. Until a significant fraction of people care about the project, nobody cares whether it's open source.
3. Open sourcing a project is not a road to free labor. Building a community of users is a potential way to garner useful pull requests. But a community of users comes first.
4. Generally, my impression is that building a community of open source users is harder than finding customers for a business.
Good luck.