

Ask HN: to open-source or not to open-source? - eloff

To open-source or not to? I&#x27;m leaning in favor of open-sourcing only the developer-facing code, and not the underlying C library for a few years and then open-sourcing that as well. The project is commercial-licensed. Here&#x27;s my reasoning:<p>Advantages of open-source:<p>+Might get some &quot;free&quot; patches, security audits, and even features<p>+Might get more sales because developers like open-source<p>+Easier for the good guys to spot security flaws<p>Disadvantages:<p>-Larger competitors with lots of resources can steal the best of the innovative architecture we have and implement it in their products<p>-Easier for the bad guys to spot security flaws<p>-Might merge a contribution that infringes the GPL or a patent<p>That first disadvantage there is the one that gets me, for a fragile startup
it seems that a competitor with orders of magnitude more resources could steal our competitive advantage and kill us off before we gain significant traction. Granted they can still do that with reverse-engineering the optimized binaries, it&#x27;s just hard enough that combined with the usual &quot;not invented here&quot; hubris, we&#x27;ll probably fly under the radar for long enough. Once we have enough traction it doesn&#x27;t matter as much, hence why I&#x27;d want to open-source it completely down the road. However, I&#x27;m open to hearing arguments for and against.
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neur0mancer
You are forgetting one advantage: If you open-source, you will undermine your
competitors.

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eloff
And the magic process through which that happens is?

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neur0mancer
[http://opensource.com/law/13/1/making-commercial-open-
source...](http://opensource.com/law/13/1/making-commercial-open-source-
software)

