Your Open Source Project is a Product

Ok, so people in the open source ecosystem can get touchy when you draw too many parallels between open source projects and products. But if you’re an open source company, you need to approach your open source project as if it were a product. If you have an open source project plus an enterprise edition (paid product), you are a two-product company. If you have an open source project, and on-prem enterprise edition and a cloud-hosted offering, you are a three-product company.

If you’ve made the decision to be an open source company and invest in an open source project, you have to treat that project with the same level of seriousness as you would any product. That means positioning it intentionally, it means conducting user interviews, it means marketing efforts that focus exclusively on the open source project. It means understanding the target audience for your open source project as something that exists independently from the target audience for your commercial product(s).

Open source companies are most successful when they are extremely serious about their open source projects’ long-term success, and invest in them as if that long-term success was critical to the company survival. Because it is.

And if you don’t want to make that investment… don’t bother with being an open source company. It is perfectly possible (and possibly easier) to build a successful closed-source company. And there is no shame being a closed-source company.