Would your answer change if we were talking about academic research? Where the work is material to the final product? Is there an inflection along the gradient where closing source is better for users? Because e.g. the org is more focused?
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What matters is whether sufficient funding is available to produce the insights you care about. In some domains (often tools for thought because of insight-through-making), this requires funding a $$$-skills team for years. If an academic grant lets you do that, great—OSS away.
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(of course the other thing that matters a lot here is that dollars are not fungible; grant dollars push you around differently from VC dollars / bootstrap dollars / Patreon dollars…)
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I can appreciate an argument that VCs may be less willing to fund a project whose code is open source, though I have a hard time imagining this being a/the deciding factor.
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Venture funding requires that projects be able to produce (lots of) revenue. It is of course possible to produce revenue with OSS, but it's not the norm, and it requires thoughtful strategy. If you have such a strategy, great!
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You also need to explain why your future closed-source competitor, which can leverage your work for free, will not simply eat you. There are approaches for this, too, but again, you'd better have an explicit strategy.
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Why shouldn't they?
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You won't get funded if it seems likely that they will, so you won't produce transformative insight. If you get funded anyway, you have repeated games to worry about.
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I think I have to agree that there can be additional challenges (e.g. funding) with a project which has its source open source. Closing source is a defense mechanism.
I am willing to admit I may have bias; I've seen many open source projects succeed in my bubble.
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Succeed to the level that they can spend millions per year on team indefinitely long into the future?
Only ones I've seen like that had ICOs
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There are lots of examples which meet this bar, but they all have carefully-crafted strategies for the relationship between OSS and their business. See this index:
2 random thoughts on the list: 1) A heavy bias towards enterprise where the company packages & provides support, and 2) a significant number of companies that built on top of existing projects rather than create them themselves.
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Yeah. Happily for the ecosystem, in the case of 2), those companies have all become major contributors to the original projects.
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Gatsby has raised a ton of money with an entirely OS project and the "we will treat it in the best possible way in our cloud" strategy. Similar with Vercel & Next.js.
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Strong counterpoints, but again, dont think this is moral issue.
Their users are all developers, our's are not.
The context here are many years of disagreement btw Mek and myself. There is a reason his name is in the screenshot on our landing page.
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Great counterpoint, great dataset.
Could maybe see argument that git, firefox, wordpress/drupal are TTFT.
Have github and gitlab improved git itself though?
Seems like actual TFT work is closed there.
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