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Ask HN: I want to open source a my SaaS project. What should I know?

3 points by yuppiepuppie ↗ HN
My current side project is closed source, and I want to make it open as I believe it can benefit from some community love (also I'm not making money off it, so not much to lose!).

Besides the usual things like good documentation, purging secrets, easy dev/deployment process, what else should I know?

Also, its currently hosted on Gitlab, I like the CI/CD better. Is it worth switching to Github for the starzzz?

Background: Ive managed large OSS packages, but nothing SAAS-like.

3 comments

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factorialboy
Gnome and several other Linux related open source projects live on GitLab.

Perhaps you can mirror onto Github to attract the "walk-in" crowd.

gus_massa
Choose your license carefully. At least you must understand the differences, advantages and disadvantages of MIT vs GPL vs AGPL.

(If your idea in the future is to use AGPL and sell a dual license, you must ask for a CLA. But I hate CLA.)

Super easy foolproof instruction to build are very important. Something like "./configure & make".

b20000
once you make it open source, how do you plan to make money with it? if you will dual license, how will you monitor commercial use by companies without a license? how will you monitor and prevent people ripping off (part of) your code and publishing it under another license? or integrating parts into a closed source commercial product?

consider that most people will not contribute and will seek ways to profit from it without paying you.

you could provide support or services but that will not scale.