Ask HN: Should-we open-source our meeting bot? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should-we open-source our meeting bot?

2 pointsErazal9 comments

We've created a meeting bot that integrates with the 3 major meeting platforms (Zoom / Teams / Microsoft Teams), and then gives users: - the transcript, - a ChatGPT summary, - the video recording - avideo-reel of the meeting higlights, along with GPT summaries of the meeting highlights.

=> https://spoke.app

Unfortunately, due to various reasons, we haven't had the success we hoped for, although the sector in general (AI video meeting assistants) was and is still booming.

One reason why we often failed to convince companies were privacy and security reasons.

1. Do you think companies could be easier to convince as regards security if the main aspects of the app were open-source?

2. Do you think that by open-sourcing our meeting bot, we could be the "pick and shovel" for this new AI assistant meeting boom? What potential risks and benefits do you see to that?

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Are you a software company selling software? Then probably not. Are you a software service company selling the convenience of running your software for a relatively competitive price? Then yes.

There are some who will just grab your software and run it locally, but those people were unlikely to be your customers anyways. And then there are those who will pay you to run the software so they don’t have to spend their own engineering resources on it. These are your customers.

Unless something in your code is secret or the software is so trivial to run reliably and keep up to date I see no reason to keep most SaaS software closed source.

thanks for the reply!

Yes we are a software service company selling that convenience. The code isn't "secret" but is definitely non-trivial to build and maintain.

My fear would rather be that a close-source competitor grabs our meeting bot, and builds on top, rather than using our service as an API.

If we were to open-source the software, we'd probably also offer it as an API for AI meeting companies.

Why not open source it as GPL?

it looks like an interesting concept, I would love to try it !

I work on B2B SaaS applications for medium/large industrial company and I don't think open source would improve your security posture for this type of client. IT departments have to evaluate vendors against a set of criteria and you pass or fail. if they are worried about the confidentiality of their data, then another approach would be to let them run your chatbot in their own cloud environment (or on premises).

this approach is appealing for a lot of companies. for instance, just looking at Azure, if you make your application part of the MS Transact program, then the client would simply pay their monthly/annual azure subscription and your license would just be a line item on it. this may seem pointless but large corp tend to negotiate deals with cloud providers and negotiate a better deal provide they spend a certain amount per year. if your solution helps them achieve this amount, it's very appealing

Beyond that, you can work on complying with SOCII or other programs

that'd be awesome, also saving up on our own cloud costs.

How long do contracts with such large corps usually take to enter in action, from the first meeting?

One reason we failed to convince companies were privacy and security.

Business is like dating. They're just "not that into you," and will offer the most ready response to make you go away.

I can assure you open-sourcing your chatbot won't change their minds. It's not like they have personnel eagerly waiting to vet your code for vulnerabilities.

aha thanks for that brutally honest response :)

curious - how does "Teams" vary from "Microsoft Teams"?

I used it as a shortcut for Microsoft Teams, they're the same.

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