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Ask HN: Is it worth open-sourcing my early stage startup?

15 points by derwiki ↗ HN
It's something I was interested in trying to do at my last job before I quit, but the battle was hand auditing an entire, mature codebase. The site I want to open source (http://www.cameralends.com) is less than 2 months old and could easily be audited. I'm interested in open source because:

- holds me to a higher standard of quality

- reduces the barrier for collaboration (anyone can submit a pull request)

- builds trust with the users

I think I understand the application level risks I'd be taking doing this, but I'm not sure about the business/legal implications. Would doing this make my startup stronger or weaker?

8 comments

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arb99
>- builds trust with the users

Most of your market honestly won't care if you have open sourced your code (and it won't build up any further trust).

jmm57
Maybe not main stream users. However, the market right now seems to be early-adopter-type camera geeks in San Francisco. I would think open sourcing the application would garner some serious respect from that crowd, if not trust.
argonaut
Unless these camera geeks are also software developers that actively follow open-source projects, I doubt they actually care. The intersection between those two groups, multiplied by the very slight amount of trust that is gained (teyc was right in that users don't care about your code, they care about other users), while non-zero, is not substantial enough to warrant open-sourcing and all the hurdles that come with it.
AznHisoka
Honestly, it doesn't matter. You're better off worrying about how to get a ton of users by ranking high in search engines, and developing good word of mouth.
QuantumGuy
It doesn't really matter as long as your startup is good, people really could care less. Besides with an open source startup people can help you debug. Which is exactly what the people I am working with did. https://github.com/lefnire/habitrpg https://github.com/lefnire/habitrpg/wiki/Business-Model We even got a kickstarter for our open source startup http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lefnire/habitrpg-mobile So no it is not a bad idea to open source your startup just be careful.
teyc
Your site is a marketplace. What users need is trust in other users, not trust in your source code. What happens if someone loses your pricey lens? Or sells it on ebay and disappears? Those are the main issues.

Furthermore, you aren't in the open source business. What happens if someone offers you a patch, and it is not in the direction you want to go? What happens if someone is not satisfied with your service and forks the code base? Now you have even more problems.

officialjunk
Doesn't sound like open sourcing is relavent to your product. Focus on the minimal viable product, getting users and growing that revenue stream first. You can always open source later.
miriadis
I absolutely agree with other comments here. This is not a software startup, is a service and nobody cares about the software that supports it. You should concentrate you efforts on provide the best support you can and not the technical details.