[seanwilson]

I work on a paid Chrome extension that tests if your website follows SEO, speed and security best practices:

https://www.checkbot.io/

I considered making it open source but couldn't see a way I could monetise it if I tried to charge for it mainly because someone could just upload a free version to the Chrome Web Store. Open sourcing a project also opens you up to taking on a lot more responsibilities as well (e.g. reviewing pull requests, on-boarding new developers, maintaining code standards) and you risk losing control of your own project if you're not careful. Helping users with support requests is already enough work when you're a solo developer too.

Generally, I guess you have to weigh up:

1) time investment from open sourcing and maintaining a community vs

2) benefits you'll get from having open source contributors vs

3) increased competition from the open source version

With some app ideas, it's very hard to reduce the impact of factor 3 which is a shame.

[capableweb]

> Open sourcing a project also opens you up to taking on a lot more responsibilities as well (e.g. reviewing pull requests, on-boarding new developers, maintaining code standards) and you risk losing control of your own project if you're not careful

I agree with the rest of what you said, but not this quoted parts.

Open sourcing your project has nothing to do with pull requests (you don't have to accept outside changes), onboarding new developers (you don't have to provide support) or maintain code standards. You get to do exactly whatever you want, whatever that means.

Risk losing control of your own project? How would that even happen? Unless you put someone in charge of your project, and they run away with the keys (sort of), I don't see how someone can "steal" your project.

[seanwilson]

> Open sourcing your project has nothing to do with pull requests (you don't have to accept outside changes), onboarding new developers (you don't have to provide support) or maintain code standards. You get to do exactly whatever you want, whatever that means.

I meant this in the sense of open sourcing a project and encouraging a community around it so other developers would help introduce new features and fix bugs. If you don't do this, aren't you missing out on a lot of big reasons to make it open source?

> Risk losing control of your own project? How would that even happen? Unless you put someone in charge of your project, and they run away with the keys (sort of), I don't see how someone can "steal" your project.

Someone could fork the project, rebrand it and take it in a new direction, especially if you weren't dedicating enough time to it e.g. ignoring pull requests.

Going back to my list, if you aren't doing item 1, you're not going to get much of benefit 2, and item 3 is going to be a risk for little gain.

[capableweb]

> I meant this in the sense of open sourcing a project and encouraging a community around it so other developers would help introduce new features and fix bugs.

I see. I don't want to be pedantic (but I guess I am anyway) but building a community and open sourcing code are two very different things. If you're running a business, in no way should we force them to do what we can call "community open source". The idea is that you can modify the code to your needs, and neither of the community things are absolutely needed for this. Of course it helps, but I feel like we miss out on a lot of companies open sourcing their code if we only care if they build a open source community too.

> If you don't do this, aren't you missing out on a lot of big reasons to make it open source?

Everyone have their own reasons for open sourcing something. I'm sure everyone could handle their incoming open source contributions better, but in the end it's up to the companies/organizations/projects/people themselves.

> Someone could fork the project, rebrand it and take it in a new direction, especially if you weren't dedicating enough time to it e.g. ignoring pull requests.

That sounds great to me, maybe I'm missing something. If someone makes something that is better than your thing, wouldn't the best thing (for the users) be to use that then? Or if it makes different tradeoffs, that maybe makes sense in more scenarios?

You still have to make sure you're a better product for someone to purchase, if you now so persistently want to run a company based on your open source code. You can still run a better product than your competitors.

Also, if you don't want to open source your code, that's fine too. Probably in the future (if not already), having open source code is a advantage against your competitors.

[seanwilson]

> Of course it helps, but I feel like we miss out on a lot of companies open sourcing their code if we only care if they build a open source community too.

Personally speaking, open sourcing something with no intention of responding to interested developers doesn't feel right.

> You still have to make sure you're a better product for someone to purchase, if you now so persistently want to run a company based on your open source code. You can still run a better product than your competitors.

When you open source though, aren't you making it significantly easier for people to build a product better than yours?

If it's a paid product that works without hosting, what's to stop someone just selling it cheaper or releasing it for free?

[capableweb]

> Personally speaking, open sourcing something with no intention of responding to interested developers doesn't feel right.

Everyone is different :)

> When you open source though, aren't you making it significantly easier for people to build a product better than yours?

If the only benefit from you and a competitor is a particular feature or something else that you gain from proprietary code, you're gonna lose eventually anyway. You need something stronger if you are to survive. There needs to be something more between you and your competitors than something that can be easily copied (like most features in most products).

Some companies focuses on integrations/synergy (like Apple, easier the more stuff from them you have) while others on other things.

[kemitchell]

I lead a project to develop a strong-copyleft license that makes development tools "free for open source":

https://paritylicense.com

The idea was that developers like you could make your tools available under Parity and charge folks who want to use their code to develop closed, rather than open, software. However, several projects and companies have also used the license simply to make sure their work stays open, without selling any permission to build closed projects.

[seanwilson]

I like the idea. How would it stop someone releasing a free version of a paid development tool though? It relies on people downloading the free tool to be honest enough not to use it on commercial projects?

[kemitchell]

No license can guarantee compliance with its own rules. That's true of all copyleft licenses, including GPL, EPL, and MPL.

Whether and how to enforce the license is up to the developer.