[abbradar]

Funny that you mention Nix, because our infrastructure is actually completely NixOS-based. But that's only because I was (and am!) a huge fan of it, and it keeps the amount of people needed to manage our infra at one ;)

I agree with you, building an open-source community is among the hardest things to do, true both for commercial and passion projects. And you said it, the amount of the developers willing to donate their time to an obscure F# codebase is probably close to zero. So the way I see it, open-sourcing for us is not a way to gain developers of our product, but the developers on our product.

Our "product" is technically a modular JavaScript + CustomQL platform which the partners are coding on to create or customize products for the target business. Similar to the other CRM/ERP platforms on the market, it locks them in with the amount of code and in-house knowledge that they have for the platform. And we are in a chicken-and-egg situation: without an existing base of integrations, partners and solutions for the end businesses, both prospective customers and partners see risks in the support and custom development costs that they are not willing to take.

We hope that open-sourcing (thus also giving the way to run the product on your own servers for free) gives potential partners a really sweet deal compared to the traditional cut-based cloud SaaS offerings, and can help us build a network of these partners and integrations that we need. And being a CRP/ERM platform, potential ways to monetize it are still aplenty (paid-for enhancements, integrations, cloud offerings etc).