Company development process
Hi All,
I am currently in the process of building the MVP for ciconcierge.com, which I posted about at CI Concierge Service, and I am starting to think how I want to proceed with the features development after the MVP is done.
I am seeing multiple startup companies doing development in the open and giving away the code and sometimes deployment for free, e.g:
My questions are:
- What are the pros and cons of going down the route of open source development vs closed source?
- This is my first attempt at creating a business. Should that influence my decision regarding leaning one way or the other?
- Anything else that I should take into consideration regarding this decision?
You'd have to explain more about what you are doing. The companies you list had a reason for open sourcing - developers are using them at a technical level and there is nothing to lose by open sourcing because nobody wants to run a whole DevOps environment to use those products - easier to pay.
This is the original post where I mention what I am creating the MVP for: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/idea-for-a-ci-service-a-k-a-ci-concierge-8412f4564a.
In essence, it would be an umbrella service to provide common pull requests automation tools in easy to use manner
Okay as a potential consumer of that service I don't think open source would be enough of a selling point to make a difference for me. Others may feel differently.
@disrael Thanks for your insights!!
Reasons for open source:
I think it's hard to do open source with a profitable offer, it needs scale for one, specific usage patterns (don't fit every or possibly many offers) and a few other special cases I'm not sure people fully pin pointed yet..
@hatkyinc Thanks for the reply. That's a lot of great information!