Why don't more indie hackers open source?
We all praise "building in public."
But why do so few indie hackers open source their software?
Are they scared people with steal their code?
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We all praise "building in public."
But why do so few indie hackers open source their software?
Are they scared people with steal their code?
Open sourcing also has some additional costs to it, making the codebase more organized, making sure you're not giving away any critical business logic that you wanna keep private, etc. At early stages of a product it's not worth it because of these reasons. However once a product matures enough I see no reason why something can't be open-sourced. Very few users will self-host it anyway.
Also it depends upon your moat. If the code is your moat then better wait for a long time and build a solid customer base, and then only make it open source.
That's a solid answer @sumitg, thanks.
I guess I'm doubting whether the fear of code theft is a rational one though. Just seems unlikely that someone copying a codebase would be able to build the better product in the long run.
I open source only parts of the code that will not directly help my potential competitors.
Also, sadly I don't open source as much as I'd like to because it takes quite a lot of time and I have limited amount of it, especially having a kid
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
I think the OP was more about open-sourcing a project but keeping the revenue stream in the hosted version only, not the open-source one. But yeah if someone is thinking about earning money through the open-source version, that's gonna be a tough challenge like you said.