[softwaredoug]

You open source to build a major piece of developer mindshare. You have to ask what the value of this is, and what, if any, moat would you have on that mindshare?

Mindshare can be valuable if you're doing it for recruiting purposes. Or if you’re a major cloud provider and want to create the de facto solution to a problem so people will buy your cloud service version of it. Or you’re a consultancy and you want to offer services around it.

But doing open source well requires deep pockets often unclear upside. Who builds the open source full time? Develops the community and conferences? Who evangelizes the tech and gets devs excited about it? Who teaches the tech? Who engages the community to see what features are needed?

All that takes significant investment. What’s the business mode to capitalize on the dev mindshare you’re getting enough to support all that? How would such work on the community support your business model. And developers will resist you “owning” the community.

You know who can invest at any time in your community and take on the risk, even if the upside is years away? Big tech companies. They can hire away your best OSS devs and evangelize their “love” of open source more effectively than you. Just look at Amazon taking on Mongo and Elastic right now for an example of this.

So not sure your exact problem space or business model, but there’s a lot of reason to tread carefully. The projects success doesn’t mean much of you have no moat and a big tech company can come in and land and expand in “your” community once the project gains enough traction to be interesting to them.

[YKreator]

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my question. It's an answer that actually clarifies the feeling I had. We want to offer a service on top of existing cloud services. And I'm not sure if I can bring any additional value from an open-source version. I think we will start private first :-)