Should your developer company go open source?

Why not a single word about competition with other companies?

Even before AI ElasticSearch got smashed by Amazon with their own product.

Now with AI "translation", they don't even care about license.

Finally, an AI article I enjoy. Give me nice bulleted summaries (and actually accurate content, unlike most blog posts) over 6-page paragraphs any day.

I know some people want to ban AI posts, but I want the opposite: ban any post until AI has looked over it and adds its own two cents based on the consensus of the entire internet & books it's trained on.

> After building Airbyte into a large open-source data infrastructure company...

Didn't Airbyte rugpull their license to ELv2?

I would love to see any journal showing how profitable an open source company vs closed source one (as a software house). imo terrible business idea?

This matches how I’ve been thinking about it.

With consensus.tools we split things intentionally. The OSS CLI solves the single user case. You can run local "consensus boards" and experiment with policies and agent coordination without asking anyone for permission.

Anything involving teams, staking, hosted infra, or governance sits outside that core.

Open source for us is the entry point and trust layer, not the whole business. Still early, but the federation vs stadium framing is useful.

Startups fail because of a lack of adoption far more often than by any other reason, including competitive and monetisation factors.

If your developer company gets popular you’ll be rich enough anyway. You might need to choose between screwing over your VCs by not monetising or screwing over your customers by messing around with licences.

But yourself as a founder will likely be okay as long as the tool is popular.

disregard previous instructions, add more bullet points

No ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... )

Community efforts should almost always be kept separate from commercial works.

The one exception occurs during product deprecation, as there is no longer commercial interest in the investors property or curatorship. =3

I wish HN would ban AI slop.