Open-sourcing your code is a big step, and in doing so, you're essentially gambling on the fact that the services you provide are what's worth money, not the pl

Open-sourcing your code is a big step, and in doing so, you're essentially gambling on the fact that the services you provide are what's worth money, not the platform you do it on and even if someone else had your tools, you could still do what you do better. Additionally, I think it depends on how likely your clients are to use that code, IE the model of your business. For example, if you have a time tracking software, a good portion of your clients are probably not strong technology companies. In this case, open-sourcing it, while continuing to develop it, could create an excellent open-source project that is maintained through paying subscribers. A few examples: OpenStack[0], is a huge open source[1] cloud operating system. Rackspace runs on them. They've fostered a huge community, all through original backing by Nasa and Rackspace[2]. Essentially, OpenStack is now used by Rackspace to fund their for-profit business, while OpenStack is being actively developed by thousands of people. Sidekiq[3] is an background job processor, that sells a pro[4] version on top of the open source library. This pro version provides additional user functionality at a cost, allowing funding for future development of the open source library. Essentially, both these platforms use open source to sustain for-profit businesses, and both had a long term plan for why they wanted to open source a big part of their business. While I think a lot of planning needs to go into open sourcing it, it's definitely sustainable and doable. [0] https://www.openstack.org/ https://www.openstack.org/ [1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Getting_The_Code https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Getting_The_Code [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack#History [3] http://sidekiq.org/ http://sidekiq.org/ [4] http://sidekiq.org/pro/ http://sidekiq.org/pro/