Should You Open Source Your Startup?

what if i told you you could get developers to work on your project for free and all you have to do is put the code on github so they can see it and then contribute to it does that sound interesting to you good stay tuned because i'm about to launch a new course for 19.99 a month because of course this is continual learning where you're going to learn how to utilize developers to work for you for free i love open source codes without reality is some of you actually want that course i'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news but that course doesn't actually exist and open source is very far from free labor i just finished working on a popular open source project called doge house with over 400 contributors and in this video i'm going to be going over the pros and cons and give you some criteria on whether you should open source your startup you shouldn't it sucks and i hate open source i wouldn't be surprised if a statistic came out that said like 90 percent of maintainers of open source projects aka the person in charge are overworked underpaid and have seasonal depression and the season that they're depressed in is year round okay it's actually not that bad but i just feel like people have never been involved in leadership of open source projects always look at it with like really green rose tinted whatever goggles and are thinking it's this great wonderful thing and the person in charge is just getting all these things for free and no one realizes the hidden costs of operating everything and as your project gets more popular and more people get involved the cost that you pay increases but instead of paying usd or fiat as my crypto buddies like to call it you pay in time it's close to a full-time job to properly manage an open source project and you'll find the amount of time you have to actually code becomes less and less and less until you're kind of just an open source manager and it's kind of miserable there are three tasks that will eat up your time the first is reviewing code that contributors want to merge into the project and making sure that doesn't utterly destroy the project secondly when bug reports or future requests come in you're gonna need to categorize prioritize ask follow-up questions or maybe even just close the issue all together third is assisting new developers that want to get involved in the project so this includes helping them get set up assigning them work to do and just answering any questions that they have personally i got overwhelmed with all the work involved and just completely stopped helping new developers and looking at issues and only focused on reviewing code the project definitely suffered because of this and i'm sure there's lots of developers that wanted to get involved that just got ignored by me but it was the only thing that i could do to get any coding done for myself another important thing to realize is you get what you pay for because you don't usually pay open source contributors any money they are free spirits to come and go whenever they want and just work on stuff when they get some free time the average open source contributor is pretty unreliable and won't know the code base that well causing them to introduce bugs and it's not really their fault it's just a result of how the incentives are aligned a developer will claim a task on an open source project and they might complete it tomorrow next week next month maybe never if something comes up in their life or they just lose interest because of this usually don't give new contributors important things that need to be done instead you kind of give them small features or bug fixes that it doesn't really matter when they get completed or if it never happens they're just not that big of a deal and the funny thing is it doesn't actually get much better if they follow through and actually submit some code because then all of a sudden you're spending hours going back and forth in the comments giving feedback on something that doesn't even change the project at all doesn't move it forward and you could have finished in like two minutes and so you just start questioning your life choices why am i doing all this and spending so much time on this meaningless thing it's like don't get me wrong i do think it's valuable to invest time in teaching developers especially if they're going to be on a project for a little bit but it feels like a huge waste of time because the majority of contributors will just disappear into thin air and i don't blame them they're not being paid like i would do the same thing one contributor that consistently works on the project is way more valuable than the hundreds of developers that do one task and then bounce so it's super important to start identifying the consistent cardinals that are going to be there and teach them spend time doing things with them and ignore the grasshoppers that are just bounce gone by productivity wise i think just a small startup team of like three people can get a lot more done and do a lot more damage than these open source projects that have hundreds developers that look like they're doing so much but in reality it's just you can set up an efficient open source project but just know it's going to take a lot of time and effort that are going to take away from you driving your startup forward it's going to be a distraction i think it's too much for one person to code on a project manage the open source and try running a startup i think you can try a max of doing two of those things or just get some co-founders so i would never open source a project with the intent of getting free work out of developers because the work that you are going to be putting in to maintain everything is going to be equal to or maybe greater than the work that you get in return now you may put your code on github and just get absolutely no one contributing to it or maybe just one or two people and i think in a lot of ways this is better because you avoid all the problems that i just described but you still get the one big benefit of open sourcing something which is marketing developers love having the ability to look at the code of products that they use even if 90 of them don't ever have the intention of actually going through it if a company is willing to open source their code base that's a sign of good faith at least 95 of the time they're not doing anything sketchy so if i'm looking at two products and one of them is open source and they're relatively equivalent i'm gonna pick the open source product every single time note this only really carries weight with tech people and more specifically developers so if that's not your demographic marketing it as open source is gonna do absolutely nothing for you this is kind of a minor thing but if your project does start to pop off a little bit it will be shown in the github trending page and so even more developers will be exposed to it but to be honest i don't even know how valuable that even is i've heard some people say that when you open source a project it helps with security because there's more eyeballs looking at it but for me i've had the opposite experience because the person that is going to be studying your code the most for vulnerabilities is the person that wants to hack it you can minimize hackers doing malicious things by offering a bug bounty but i think in general when you open source your code it makes it easier to hack we had a situation where we were using a regular expression to restrict domains and somebody looked at how the regular expression was written found that there was a bug in it they then purchased a domain and basically abused it based on that if the code wasn't publicly available the vulnerability still would have been there but it would be much harder to find and then abuse it but ben if i open source my startup can i still make money with it the answer is yes and lots of companies do it but you just need to make sure that your value proposition is in a hundred percent tied to your code for doge house anyone could spin up their own instance but would be missing the community of people that are using my instance dogehouse.tv and that is where the value comes from the default monetization strategy that pretty much every open source project uses is just to have a hosted version that's more convenient than people trying to run the code themselves in talking with investors none of them were put off with dogehouse being open source and some of them even preferred it if your business model doesn't conflict with showing your code to the world it's usually an advantage to do so one other perk is translations doge house was translated into a bunch of different languages thanks to the help of native speakers from around the world and a couple of scrubs that were copy pasting stuff from google translations the tldr is if i'm working on a startup that involves developers in any way and it doesn't use any proprietary knowledge like big brain machine learning stuff and business models compatible then i'm going to open source it otherwise i'm not if i was going to start doge house from scratch i would definitely open source it again the project makes a lot of sense to be open source the only thing i would change is probably do it with a co-founder you can finally get a haircut look eric i've got a mop on my head right now i don't understand it either but girls love it trust me on this one grow out your hair eric is gonna do wonders for you lastly i'm holding an art contest for bin awad merch the winners will have their choice of a hundred dollars or a 30 minute zoom call with me anything is fair game so if you're artistically inclined upload your designs to the subreddit otherwise if you're like me and artistically challenged check out the subreddit and upvote your favorite designs that you want to see on t-shirt deadline is june 16. you

Channel: Ben Awad

Views: 96,123

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Id: YIL5fuAUPiA

Length: 8min 29sec (509 seconds)

Published: Wed May 26 2021