Please, Stop Asking Us to Open Source Our Products
At Candid, we build closed source software, and we believe there’s nothing wrong with that. Unfortunately, some of our customers disagree, and some of the conversations turn into very awkward exchanges. Our stance on open source describes what it would take to open source our products, but sometimes that’s just not enough.
Open Source or Bust
By far the most common exchange with potential customers looks like this:
Hello, I am interested in purchasing your software, however I can’t seem to find the source code on GitHub. I only use 100% Certified Organic Open Source Software, so I’ll have to pass on this unless you open source it.
We’ve tried to tailor our open source messaging to assuage folks like this, but it’s almost always a non-starter with them (and we respect that). So instead of making a case for closed source software, we send these folks links to competing open source projects. Surprisingly, a fair amount of them end up becoming customers after playing around with what’s out there.
Demands to Action
The second most common exchange goes something like this:
It’s a pity your products aren’t open source. This other super cool app is, and it’s going to destroy you someday unless you open source! Having your product open source means it’s a cool app, don’t you want your app to be cool?
Unlike the first exchange, these folks have a really hard time taking no for an answer, and can even turn slightly hostile. We have a tendency to ghost folks like this after a few back and forth emails (sorry), we really don’t have the time to get into philosophical arguments around source availability.
Sorry, Contributions Not Welcome
Finally, the last exchange comes from a good place, but it isn’t something we can easily support:
I really like your product and want to contribute this cool feature to it. Can you open source it so I can add my bespoke need?
These ones are tough because more helpers are always appreciated. However, for us, managing contributions ends up being a full time job for a lot of projects, on top of figuring out where these contributions land on the roadmap. And if you can’t keep up with contributions (or don’t accept the right ones), you run the risk of being hard forked and potentially fading away. So we end up turning these folks away most of the time (typically with a very detailed feature request), though there has been a few occasions where we found a way to enable them to contribute via partial source sharing or pair programming/screen sharing.
We’re always on the look out for other businesses that have successfully threaded the needle of Open Source Software and B2B/B2C for-profit to see what we can replicate. Right now, there’s just too many risks and not enough reward for us to change course.