Ask HN: Should I Open Source Every Product I Build as an Indie Developer?
I'm an indie developer who has built several free-to-use tool applications that I plan to monetize through advertising once they gain enough users. My dilemma is whether to open source these products now, or wait until they're more established. Definitely not. Disclosing your code makes sense only if you are young and want to have something to show to recruiters in case you are looking for a job as a proof that you know what you are doing. But that is a young man's game. You will gain absolutely nothing by giving the code away. Especially now when bots are scraping the whole internet for data. It depends on what you're building and if you're trying to build a business, or just make a few bucks on the side. If you're trying to build a business, your decision to open source it should be in service of that goal. Is it a developer tool/library with a commercial offering that builds on top of it where open-sourcing it is your main marketing source? If so, then that can be a solid strategy. But if they are just regular tools you're building, then likely there are far better marketing strategies than using open-source. And that is great to want to give back with open source. But if you're just starting out on your business, then that is a major distraction from the main task at hand. > My dilemma is whether to open source these products now, or wait until they're more established. I find this statement curious because I don't understand why there should be a connection between software being "established" and being open source. What is your goal here? I always want to contribute something to the community, and I think open source is really cool. As an individual developer, I also hope to gain some attention by open-sourcing my own work. Perhaps you can open source some side library that you created to use in your project. > I also hope to gain some attention by open-sourcing my own work. In the worse case, nobody will notice them. In the best case AWS will host it (and not pay you, because the licence says they can do that.) I tend to open source my projects when they fail. Only if you want to die poor and stressed. That is a lot of free work that most likely won't bring you benefits. > monetize through advertising If you open-source, what's preventing someone running a quick copy elsewhere? That's what I'm considering. Once my product becomes relatively mature and gains a certain user base, a simple copy by others shouldn't be able to take my users away. You could use 37Signal's new OSassy license: https://osaasy.dev/ "do-whatever-you-want license, but with the commercial rights for SaaS reserved for the copyright holder" Just a question, why do you want to open source at all? It's simply because I've been immersed in the open-source community for a long time and have received a lot of help from others' open-source projects. I think open-sourcing my own work is a really cool thing to do. Moreover, I genuinely hope to gain more visibility through open source and access new ideas and opportunities. Naah bro, it's hard to monetize open source projects. Yes, I understand. That's precisely why I'm considering not open-sourcing it immediately, but rather doing so after gaining some traction. Alternatively, perhaps I could just open-source some of the tooling components of my product and publish them to NPM.