Is 'open source' a value statement?

Short answer: No. The fact that you are an open source startup, and that there is an open source version as well as a commercial product, is a feature, or actually an attribute, of your product. It does not, in and of itself, communicate value.

What’s the value of open source?

That said, there’s a common value package you can claim just from being open source. They vary slightly by project/product, but some common themes are:

• Transparency

• Flexibility / extensibility

• Developer-friendly

Do your users care about those things? What about buyers? Maybe. It’s also likely, as Alessio Fanelli talks about, that things like being developer-friendly matter as companies are doing a POC and playing around with the project. As soon as they’re talking about putting the project into the critical path in production applications, the fact that it’s open source becomes much less important. At that point, they care about reliability, performance and the ability to get a human on the line if anything goes wrong.

Is being open source unique?

Here’s another way that things get tricky — is being open source unique to you? In some cases, it absolutely is. In other cases, every single one of the competitors is also an open source startup. Sometimes the different thing to do would be to turn your back on open source. If all your competitors are open source startups, then the fact that you are too is not something you need to proclaim loudly.

If, as is often the case, your project is in an ecosystem where being open source is considered tablestakes, it’s important that people be able to discover that you are open source without too much effort, but it’s likewise important not to lead with it. You want to use that initial attention you get when someone first discovers you to talk about the way you are different, not the fact that you meet the most basic requirements everyone expects from a solution in your space.

I’m not cynical enough to say that open source is a go to market strategy, because I think being an open source startup is a business strategy with far-reaching implications. But being open source should never be your only differentiator. Even those companies that position themselves as “an open source X” are usually going after a market that is different from X, and provide some value that is different from X.

If the only value someone gets from your project is that it’s open source, that means they value it because it’s free, like free beer. That’s not a good place from which to build a company.