Ask HN: How've you seen open source used as a business strategy?
As an open-source advocate, I'd love to hear stories of how you (or your employer) have used open source as a viable business strategy and differentiator.
For myself, I regularly seek out and use appropriately licensed open source libraries to use in our commercial apps.
OpenSSL springs to mind ax an example, but there are lots.
It's a strategy only in the sense that it speeds up development. It's not a differentiator because by definition any compeditor can do the same thing - and also because its not "what we sell". Our magic sauce is in our code, not the fact we can GZip something.
Your use of the word "viable" suggests you are wanting to open-source something (yay, opensource) but at the same time have a business, And differentiate your business from the competition?
Which maybe explains why you got so few replies. The cynic in me says "good luck with that." :)
The more serious part of me says that it's hard to do, because then the "value" of your business goes from being easy to protect (we're the only ones with this code, which is protected by copyright law) to something which is hard to protect (we are the only ones with specialised knowledge for this market, we offer better support, we are better at selling.)
All of which can be easily duplicated - not least by ex-employees setting up on their own. They can even say "trained by you" on their CV.
Consulting is obviously one route, but you're always either overloaded or underloaded, and it doesn't scale so best applied in groups of 1 or 2 people.
So yeah, open source is not a term that's useful in a "build the business" meeting. At best it's a tool you can use, not something you can sell. Open sourcing your own secret sauce generally makes life harder not easier.
Sure this sucks. It would be nice to marry creating open source with making sustainable businesses, but I haven't yet seen a generic model which makes this work. There are exceptions that prove the rule, but even there there are other factors in play.
Aside: people who would advocate to use your offering _because_ it's open source make bad customers (generally speaking) because they've been trained to be bad spenders.