The team I work for recently open-sourced a version of our SaaS code. Thanks to docker, we are pretty sure that it will work for you if you follow the regular i

The team I work for recently open-sourced a version of our SaaS code. Thanks to docker, we are pretty sure that it will work for you if you follow the regular install instructions- containerization is awesome for that. The instructions on how to set up a local dev environment, without docker? That's a lot harder, has a ton more moving pieces, and if we don't actively maintain and test it regularly (to catch when libraries rot out from underneath us) I suspect that in 6-12 months those instructions will not work for anyone, because this is an incredibly complex beast doing machine-learning related things with a whole lot of dependencies and moving pieces (DB, API, Web interface, caching layer, etc.) so there are a lot of potential failure points. This was the result of a team of 3-4 SW engineers and a UX engineer working on open-sourcing our existing, working, generating actual revenue SaaS code base for 5-6 months (not as our only task but as a very important one). So it was, say, somewhere around 2 man years of effort to take something that I know exists and works and turn it into a reasonable Open Source project. There is a huge difference in the amount of work required between simple "open sourcing" and actual effective Open Sourcing, and I suspect that few if anyone involved in "Open Science" is doing that work absent large funding sources specifically requiring and supporting with money the good kind. Just a simple fork of the repo? I think the result for us would have been the same as what happened here, and I know that our SaaS project works- I can look at my paycheck and see that.