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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

It's not clear to me why you want to open source. Is your hope that your product is so good people will install it and run it for themselves? As others have said, I doubt you'll get anyone interested in writing code. It's a niche product in a less popular language, and you'd need to get people using the product who can code. Not a lot of people who use CRM/ERP also code.

What goal are you trying to achieve?

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That's all true, but why not put it out there for all to see? This project is useful. People are using it. There are customers with hundreds of users and tens of millions of rows in the database. But the product is not growing fast. What's the point of hiding this code and not putting it out into the open source?

There is a cost to open sourcing. You have to maintain the community. If your goal isn't aligned with that, then you will get upset and probably stop maintaining the community.

Unless you plan to shutter the business, it could harm you more than help to open source if you don't spend the time maintaining the community, which could be a net negative for you.

It's highly unlikely that your userbase will grow or that your product will grow faster if you open source it. So you'll be adding an extra burden and still be in the same place.

That's a counterintuitive and interesting thought, I'll have to ponder that, thanks.

Because of money? Once you open source, you can't go back without paying a heavy penalty. Also, you seem to be obsessed with growth. Saas is not an acronym for fast growth.

Open sourcing it will not necessarily give you signficantly more growth but it will give you more work and if it actually any useful, someone will fork it and make a better version then outgrow you

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