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by seanwilson
2352 days ago
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> 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. |
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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.