Should your developer company go open source?(extremefoundership.substack.com)
22 pointsby paraphrenia3 hours ago7 comments
  • 0xbadcafebee4 minutes ago
    [delayed]
  • kaicianflone29 minutes ago
    This matches how I’ve been thinking about it.

    With consensus.tools we split things intentionally. The OSS CLI solves the single user case. You can run local "consensus boards" and experiment with policies and agent coordination without asking anyone for permission.

    Anything involving teams, staking, hosted infra, or governance sits outside that core.

    Open source for us is the entry point and trust layer, not the whole business. Still early, but the federation vs stadium framing is useful.

  • CactusBlue2 hours ago
    > After building Airbyte into a large open-source data infrastructure company...

    Didn't Airbyte rugpull their license to ELv2?

  • iberator2 hours ago
    I would love to see any journal showing how profitable an open source company vs closed source one (as a software house). imo terrible business idea?
    • lionkor2 hours ago
      I suspect it depends on the customer/target audience.

      If you target developers, open source vs closed source will make a difference. For others, customers probably don't even know what GitHub is.

  • spacebanana72 hours ago
    Startups fail because of a lack of adoption far more often than by any other reason, including competitive and monetisation factors.

    If your developer company gets popular you’ll be rich enough anyway. You might need to choose between screwing over your VCs by not monetising or screwing over your customers by messing around with licences.

    But yourself as a founder will likely be okay as long as the tool is popular.

    • metadata2 hours ago
      This is not necessarily true. Wrong monetization can be the killing blow. Market can change and your business model which used to work can suddenly fall apart. A recent example for business model change is Tailwind where traffic to their open-source docs plummeted and suddenly not enough people are upgrading to their commercial licenses.

      Startups die for a variety of reasons, even if products are popular and loved.

  • Joel_Mckay28 minutes ago
    No ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... )

    Community efforts should almost always be kept separate from commercial works.

    The one exception occurs during product deprecation, as there is no longer commercial interest in the investors property or curatorship. =3

  • figmertan hour ago
    I wish HN would ban AI slop.
    • carefulfungi35 minutes ago
      (I'm editing to fix my tone).

      Having first hand experience with building multiple open source and open core dev infra companies, the advice in this article is spot on. If it is AI slop, it's still good advice.

      I'd prefer comments focused on content vs. trying to Turing-test AI generated text.

      • eddythompson8012 minutes ago
        It's not the tone, it's the content—just share your prompt
      • eptcyka19 minutes ago
        The content is ai slop, even if the original message (or prompt to the model) was sound, the delivery distracts too much from it.
    • marginalia_nu27 minutes ago
      The irony is that your best bet to actually see HN without AI slop is probably to build an AI model that identifies and filters it out.
    • benatkin43 minutes ago
      Each article like this one is an opportunity to assess whether it's mainly written by an AI or not. After reading part of this one I mostly think not (except for the obvious AI generated image), but it would be amusing if it were. "I’ve been asked a few times about my approach to open-source in the past few weeks, so decided to write this article to structure my thoughts." Is this being told from the perspective of Claude or OpenAI? I assume across the millions of users this has been asked a few times in the past few weeks. If it's from the human perspective, perhaps while he was drafting it, the AI assistant asked him about his approach a few times so that it, and in this case each conversation counts as a separate character asking him for his thoughts about it. Either way it's easier to inflate the number of people asking the author's opinion. However, for this, I dug into the author's bio, and with almost 10k followers on X, it seems likely he did get asked this a bunch of times.