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Your other comments sound dispassionate about your product. It makes it sound like you are only interested in growing a company and not in solving problems for
by from-nibly 2y ago
Your other comments sound dispassionate about your product. It makes it sound like you are only interested in growing a company and not in solving problems for your customers. You said you arent interested in slowly growing a business that is currently making you money
This is completely at odds with growing an open source community. Its typically one of the slowest and most thankless jobs you can do in software. nix has been around for 10+ years and only recently are normies like me becoming interested in it.
Your product sounds like its niche, making it open source and getting other developers to contribute sounds like trying to grow a niche within a niche. Add F# and there might be like 5 people in the whole world who might care about your open source project.
Im sure your integration partners say they would like your project to be open source but they arent going to be doing ANY of the work.
I would sell your business as a turn key.
- MarkinK 2y ago> Your other comments sound dispassionate about your product. I really like what we've been able to create. I want more people to use it. > You said you arent interested in slowly growing a business I want more users. If the price is that many of them won't pay because it's open source, then that's the price. > Im sure your integration partners say they would like your project to be open source but they arent going to be doing ANY of the work. We have a very well-isolated back end (F#) and front end. I don't think integrators will be able to write in F#, but hopefully, they will be happy to refine the front end in Vue.
- dotBen 2y agonix has been around for 10+ years and only recently are normies like me becoming interested in it. Er, there's people who worked on it at Bell Labs in the 70's who would like to have a word. It's taken 50 years for Unix to become an overnight success for you normies to become interested...
- debo_ 2y agoNix is different than Unix. https://nixos.org/ https://nixos.org/
- abbradar 2y agoFunny that you mention Nix, because our infrastructure is actually completely NixOS-based. But that's only because I was (and am!) a huge fan of it, and it keeps the amount of people needed to manage our infra at one ;) I agree with you, building an open-source community is among the hardest things to do, true both for commercial and passion projects. And you said it, the amount of the developers willing to donate their time to an obscure F# codebase is probably close to zero. So the way I see it, open-sourcing for us is not a way to gain developers of our product, but the developers on our product. Our "product" is technically a modular JavaScript + CustomQL platform which the partners are coding on to create or customize products for the target business. Similar to the other CRM/ERP platforms on the market, it locks them in with the amount of code and in-house knowledge that they have for the platform. And we are in a chicken-and-egg situation: without an existing base of integrations, partners and solutions for the end businesses, both prospective customers and partners see risks in the support and custom development costs that they are not willing to take. We hope that open-sourcing (thus also giving the way to run the product on your own servers for free) gives potential partners a really sweet deal compared to the traditional cut-based cloud SaaS offerings, and can help us build a network of these partners and integrations that we need. And being a CRP/ERM platform, potential ways to monetize it are still aplenty (paid-for enhancements, integrations, cloud offerings etc).