Discuss: Should you open source your code?

Photo credit: Sabrina Gelbart

Discuss features short but strong and insightful opinions on interesting startup, entrepreneurship, and tech topics. Got a topic or question to suggest? Drop us an email or leave a comment.

Q. I am working on a product which I hope will eventually turn into a business. But a question I often get is whether my product is open source.

Right now, it is not. If one is hoping to make money from the product, should it be open source? What factors should I look at to make this decision?

—Shashi Singh, TIA reader

Editor’s note: Answers have been edited for clarity.

Sebastian Mueller, COO at MING Labs

As a partner and service provider to countless enterprise companies and startups, we have seen a variety of approaches to the topic of open source. Many enterprise companies, especially when dealing with their IT department, object to it, citing security concerns and legal and compliance reasons.

It may seem like open sourcing your code means no monetary benefits, but that is often not true. One popular model is open sourcing code for the developer community to play with and utilize, while offering commercial services (such as setup, hosting, maintenance, modifications, etc.) to enterprise companies.

In other cases, the business value isn’t in the code, but rather the product’s usage and connected databases. If Amazon chose to open source their code, anyone would be able to host their own version of Amazon, but without sellers, buyers, or products. In this case, the code itself is not the secret sauce of the business; there is no obstacle to benefitting monetarily while open sourcing at the same time.

Those we have worked with are generally willing to utilize open source code, yet reluctant to open source their own developments. This is sadly shortsighted—a community can only thrive on people being contributors as much as users. This can also be a successful way to attract great engineering talent.

Personally, unless a component is extremely novel, patentable, and critical for business success, I would opt to allow teams to open source work that adds to the global community and provides real utility.

Let’s discuss