

Ask HN: Business Justifications for Open-Source - angersock

So, I&#x27;m currently looking to justify an open-source development model for good chunks of our codebase at our startup (in addition to a more flexible IP policy, but that&#x27;s only somewhat related).<p>I&#x27;m curious how others have justified this from a business perspective.<p>Current arguments for:<p><pre><code>  * Having open-source helps developers&#x27; careers if they decide to move on (they can talk about what they did)
  * Open-source helps those building on your company&#x27;s product (because they can file better bug reports)
  * Open-source helps everyone by reducing the number of wheels that need to be reinvented
  * Open-source is the &quot;Right Thing To Do&quot; if you heavily use other open-source projects in your product.
  * Having an open-source policy helps attracts higher quality developers
  * Having open-source increases the chances of being acquihired
  * Having open-source may change the way the market behaves about a new category of product and encourage adoption
  * Having open-source encourages customers who may be scared of proprietary&#x2F;black-box solutions
</code></pre>
Current arguments against:<p><pre><code>  * Older, larger market players may take advantage of open-source to put us out of business
  * Newer players in the market may get a jump-start on the tech problems given our open-source
</code></pre>
Neutral observations:<p><pre><code>  * If we&#x27;re making 3rd-party integration easy and documenting everything, it&#x27;s almost open-source anyways (can always just clone the HTTP APIs and so forth, and build from that spec)
  * Heavy market regulation and compliance requirements discourage free-for-all development
</code></pre>
~<p>I&#x27;d love feedback, especially picking apart the pros.<p>If you&#x27;ve ever actually seen any of the cons happen, I&#x27;d also love to hear about it.<p>I can&#x27;t help but notice that Datastax, Red Hat, Docker, Canonical, and many other vendors don&#x27;t seem to have any problems publishing all their source and still keeping a profit based off of services and the hard business stuff.
======
ayr-ton
My points:

\- Normally is easier to sell software support than software licensing and for
this is good to open your source, as will be possible to gather collaboration
of other people;

\- Gathering collaboration for other people is easy to recruitment of new
talents;

\- Larger market players will offer different services if they try to take
advantage of open-source, and even if they offer the same service, costumers
prefer the core maintainers when making big contracts for support.

\- Open your code will help to make a software with better quality, as when
you can't get time to fix some bugs some people can do this if it is of big
priority for them.

------
ayr-ton
See the point of view of Jon Maddog:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2Kun7oiUfc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2Kun7oiUfc)

