Your OSS Doesn't Have to Drive Growth

In the open source business world, a lot of people talk about the open source project driving growth. Often that’s given as a primary reason for having an open source project in the first place.

This isn’t wrong. Your open source project definitely can be a source of growth, including, ultimately, a source of revenue growth. But it also misses an important point: Fueling growth is not the only way the open source project can be valuable. For example:

Your customers want/need to inspect your code. If your customers are paranoid about security, privacy or both, they might not want to take your word for it that your software is secure. I’ve heard from many open source companies that code inspectability has helped get legal teams to sign off on a deal much faster than otherwise. If your customers want you to be open source so they can inspect the code themselves, they will not care at all how many stars or downloads or active Slack users you have.

They need something flexible. Another reason to build around open source is because your market needs something that is customizable, but they don’t have the ability or desire to build it completely in-house. When you hear companies calling themselves “open source version of {well-known SaaS/proprietary software},” that’s often the value proposition the open source-ness is delivering. Again — who cares about your project’s growth trajectory or how many open source users end up being customers if flexibility is what your market cares about?

But obviously there are situations where an open source project’s ability to fuel growth is critical to the company’s commercial growth. I’ll talk about that more tomorrow.