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Is it good idea to make your product open source?

I am working on my project and I was wondering to make it open source, so I can show it in my portfolio and also my potential customers can look at it.
Is there any risk in it ?

on December 10, 2021
  1. 3

    "can show it in my portfolio" "my potential customers"

    Pick one to optimise for.

    If your customers are developers it can make sense to open source it.

    https://supabase.com/, https://plausible.io/ and other headless CMSs get a lot of traffic by being open source.

  2. 2

    I think it more depends on your target audience. If you're building a tool that gonna be used by developers or tech savvy, making it open source is a good point as it helps you reach more of your target audience, people get to try it earlier, easier.

    I don't think non-tech audience will care so much if the product is open source or not, as they just need a tool to solve their problem.

    One good point of open source is you will get help from other developers very early on, and sometimes it's really a life-saving benefit! Of course, you should make it clear to the contributors at this point that you gonna monetize it or not.