opensource was created as a financial weapon against proprietary software (and businesses). whilst it is possible with opensource to make a company that generat

opensource was created as a financial weapon against proprietary software (and businesses). whilst it is possible with opensource to make a company that generates revenue it is significantly harder. don’t. proceed with caution and consider alternative approaches such as the prosperity license (which isn’t “opensource” as per OSD) but folks are having some success with it. go look at the dependabot repo. it’s an open community that accepts contributions. the GitHub issue tracker is there. people can still see the source code and self-fix problems. best of both worlds. if you want to derisk the intellectual property from the SaaS company and do a pledge to the community then setting up a seperate entity that holds the copyright to the source code and do a commitment to community that after X years after $event the code will become opensource under OSD that’s a potential thing you could do as well. if you build a mega successful company then you could later opensource the IP as well but the best thing to do is to consider sustainability of the project - ie making money. giving away all your stuff for free is not a (easy) path to make money and many venture backed companies over the last three years are starting to learn the lesson the hard way now that capital is drying up.