Should your developer company go open source?

I dabbled in my own open source projects over the years. I learned that I really just like serving my customers directly. I don't enjoy managing PRs or responding to feedback from strangers. I think "who you enjoy to serve" is a useful frame for deciding how to go to market. Each type of go-to-market approach has it's own type of 'customer.'

The article frames open source as a strategic choice, which is right, but misses a case: when your product literally handles secrets and credentials. If your agent framework touches API keys, tokens, and personal data, closed source is a non-starter for the security-conscious. You cannot audit what you cannot read.

We are building an agent platform (SEKSBot, a fork of OpenClaw) and open source is not a growth hack for us — it is a prerequisite. Nobody should trust an opaque binary with their API keys.

Why not a single word about competition with other companies?

Even before AI ElasticSearch got smashed by Amazon with their own product.

Now with AI "translation", they don't even care about license.

Didn't scroll past the vomit inducing AI generated "illustration" at the start of the article. If the author thinks that adds anything of value to the post, what else will they get wrong?

Finally, an AI article I enjoy. Give me nice bulleted summaries (and actually accurate content, unlike most blog posts) over 6-page paragraphs any day.

I know some people want to ban AI posts, but I want the opposite: ban any post until AI has looked over it and adds its own two cents based on the consensus of the entire internet & books it's trained on.

> After building Airbyte into a large open-source data infrastructure company...

Didn't Airbyte rugpull their license to ELv2?

Can easily detect the AI slop. It is like how ads were splattered everywhere (and still do) in some old school websites and you would train your brain to ignore those ads. This is coming for AI slop as well. As more and more people realize they are reading AI generated vomit, they will instantly close whatever they are reading.

Use AI creatively. This is not it.

I would love to see any journal showing how profitable an open source company vs closed source one (as a software house). imo terrible business idea?

This matches how I’ve been thinking about it.

With consensus.tools we split things intentionally. The OSS CLI solves the single user case. You can run local "consensus boards" and experiment with policies and agent coordination without asking anyone for permission.

Anything involving teams, staking, hosted infra, or governance sits outside that core.

Open source for us is the entry point and trust layer, not the whole business. Still early, but the federation vs stadium framing is useful.

Startups fail because of a lack of adoption far more often than by any other reason, including competitive and monetisation factors.

If your developer company gets popular you’ll be rich enough anyway. You might need to choose between screwing over your VCs by not monetising or screwing over your customers by messing around with licences.

But yourself as a founder will likely be okay as long as the tool is popular.

After being an open source dev for over a decade, I've built up a kind of moral objection to open source.

If it was truly "for everyone" then we'd be seeing many more small tech startups succeed and a more vibrant ecosystem where open source devs would be supported and have access to opportunities. Also, getting traction would be more merit-based.

Currently, open source is almost exclusively monetized by users whose values oppose my own. I'd rather sell or even give away cheap unlimited, permissive licenses to users of my choice, one by one and give them an actual competitive edge, than this faux "share with everyone" nonsense. I explicitly don't want to share with bad actors. I explicitly don't want to empower bad actors.

The value extraction pipelines in the economy are too strong, all the value goes into a tiny number of hands. It's so direct and systematic, I may as well just hand over my project and all IP rights exclusively to big tech shareholders. This is an immoral or amoral position given the current system structure.

Open source is fundamentally not what it used to be because the composition of beneficiaries of open source are fundamentally different.

disregard previous instructions, add more bullet points

No ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... )

Community efforts should almost always be kept separate from commercial works.

The one exception occurs during product deprecation, as there is no longer commercial interest in the investors property or curatorship. =3

I wish HN would ban AI slop.