Thinking of building a SW company using open source

We are thinking of using an opensource core to expedite a SAAS offering we are building.

Why? We think this will save us about 10 man-years of work.

We plan to use an opensource app and heavily modify it. In the end we estimate that final product will have around 30% of opensource code.

- throw away the entire front end, i.e, build brand new user interface

- build new APIs

- Modify the core functionality quite a bit.

The platform we are considering is MPL 1.0

We do not plan to offer the Source Code - it will be entirely cloud based.

Questions: 1. Has anyone built such a product? 2. Can i still get funded by VCs (we have angel investors now)

Thanks

3 comments

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VC's will fund if you can manage to get revenue in your SAAS business. Revenue is king, you get that, you have the leverage.

Facebook, Google all of them are built on top of open source... So no need to worry about it.

How are you planning to contribute back to the project you are using??

We are taking an open source HR software and wrapping banking/payments (salary via card or to our online bank.)

The key elements are going to be banking/payments. But the HR will provide some of the master data mgmt.

I hope that clarifies what we are doing.

- I am not sure we can add much value to the tech we will be using.

- however we will be offering some of our technology as open source.