[gregmac]

> I wonder how much benefit there was from open sourcing the project: in other words, how many contributors helped out, or how many customers would refuse to buy it when it's not open source.

Contributors is easy to judge, but the second bit is not. It includes people you'll never even hear from.

For me, the big question I ask is basically "What are the chances this software becomes unavailable in the future and what's my escape plan?" These two weigh against each other -- if it's a non-critical tool and the plan is "go back to doing it the old way, with near zero business impact" then I don't really care about the chances it disappears a whole lot. If it's "Start a several-months migration effort while the business is crippled" then suddenly that first bit becomes incredibly important.

I consider chances a small (especially one-person) company disappears is fairly high. Same for a VC-funded startup (along with the chances they kill or pivot away from the product, which is effectively the same thing).

Open source means it never really becomes "unavailable": It might be costly (eg if I have to fund maintenance on my own) but it still provides low risk of crippling my business.

When I'm considering new software, the non-OSS stuff run by small companies just naturally goes to the bottom of the list for exactly this reason. If I go with something higher up on that list, that company won't even know they were being considered, let alone why I didn't pick them.