[houseatrielah]

If a single dev ignores the license and spins up the code he can outcompete you on price; Then what? Throw money at lawyers to sue someone in a foreign land? The whole idea behind SaaS is that people can't copy-paste your cd-rom and give it to their friend.

[ipaddr]

But he cannot compete on marketing and all other aspects. That single developer can just copy your product if you release code or not.

The least important part of your saas is your product.

What are you gaining from thr release

[davidpolberger]

A would-be competitor, in a country not respecting intellectual property laws, might get a few customers by launching our product and charging only a fraction of what we charge. However, what will this competitor do when their customers request new features or report bugs? Obviously, we'd be a lot more nimble in responding to such requests, so maybe this shouldn't be such a big concern after all.

Also, if this does becomes a problem, we can just stop releasing new versions publicly, at which point the competitor's offering would stagnate, while our offering would continue to improve.

[didgetmaster]

No. Worst case scenario is that the competitor has more resources than you and can be even more nimble at adding new features and fixing bugs. Because you made all the source code available, you lost all the 'head start' you had against such a competitor.

[davidpolberger]

Good point.