| If you want to hear if from the horse's mouth, I wrote about it a lot more here [0], when I open sourced my business last year. But if you don't want to read the entire post, here's the tl;dr: 1. My (larger) customers wanted the source code for auditing purposes. I was using code escrow for larger customers and it was annoying to manage. If some can have the code, why not all? 2. My customers wanted me to eliminate my bus-factor of 1. If I got hit by a bus, the business died. Now it can live on and I can grow on my terms. 3. My customers wanted to have an "out" if the business ever decided to shut down. Now they have that "out" via self-hosting/forking. 4. My customers wanted me to show them they can trust me with their vital business data, and open source builds trust. 5. I was tired of dealing with copycats (some verbatim stealing my API schema and docs). Hopefully, moving forward, nobody will want to use a closed source copycat of an open source project. 6. My (larger) customers wanted to self-host for compliance purposes (mostly i.r.t. where data is hosted and accessed). If some can self-host, why not all? As you can see, most of my reasons (but not all) stem from what my customers wanted. I didn't open source my SaaS for community, or to get free work, or to tap into "a bigger pool of effort." I did it because being closed source was a major pain point for me and my customers. So I took notes over the first 7 years, and I finally reacted. And I've only seen positives thus far (which I'll write more about later this year), so my initial fear wasn't warranted. I encourage others to do the same. (My reasons aren't going to Cal's reasons. Peer wrote about his reasons here [1].) [0]: https://keygen.sh/blog/all-your-licensing-are-belong-to-you/ [1]: https://cal.com/blog/longevity |