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Ask HN: Software community requests your product be open source.. thoughts?
Say you come up with nice software which people like. It uses the freemium model so the core functionality is free but some features are paid.
But there's a section of users who think it should be open source. They suggest they'll only use it if its open source.
What do you think about this scenario? Should you make it open source?
- wmf 10y agoIf you make it open source those people will invent new hoops for you to jump through. IMO you should killfile them and increase prices.
- WorldMaker 10y agoMaybe? It's hard to tell without more detail. Some of the question is how are you factoring your paid features versus your free features. A lot of it is how you yourselves feel about open source and how comfortable you are with the prospect. If the paid features have been built as "extensions" or "plugins" or "services" on top of the free app, then it may be the case you could easily open source the all of the existing "free" stuff without impacting your bottom line or changing your business model. If things are less cleanly split, then of course you'd have many problems to solve even before contemplating making your software open source. Open Source is great. We should all be doing more open source. It's a balancing act to make that fit our business models. A few question to ask yourselves, too, is although you clearly have vocal potential users that want an open source option, how many users is that? How much potential revenue? Arguably most such vocal groups can be surprisingly tiny minorities in your user base and there's no guarantee that if the Open Source proponents become users they will become customers. (In fact, if they are so vocally adamant on Open Source it might, albeit not always, be a sign they don't intend to be customers, merely free users for life.)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]