Technical Decisions Matter More for Open Source Companies

If you are building a proprietary software, no one cares what language it’s written in. No one (among your customers /. users, that is) cares what your backend looks like or that your architecture follows best practices (or not).

They care that it works. Full stop. This is true of proprietary DevTools, by the way. You might have people asking about your technical decisions, but it’s more because they want to verify that it will actually work.

With an open source project, it’s different. Your technical decisions are in the open, and they are a part of your growth and communication strategy. I have seen projects with bulletproof USPs struggle to gain adoption because they used a new programming language that no one wanted to learn.

Your technical decisions can even be a core differentiator. If your competitors use a framework or language that’s not widely used by the target market, the fact that you don’t can make you easier to learn and easier to use, which can be a unique value.

So what does this mean? It means that in open source startups, you can’t have an engineering organization that’s completely disconnected from your growth organization, because the two have to work together. If you say your project is by and for data scientists but it’s written in an obscure language instead of python, you sound like a liar. In a proprietary software company, where technology decisions are not in the open, this matters much, much less — because as long as it works, everyone is happy.