I’ve been asked a few times about my approach to open-source in the past few weeks, so decided to write this article to structure my thoughts.
Most founders get the open-source decision backwards. They start with “open-source is great for distribution” and work backwards to justify it.
That’s how you end up with:
an OSS project nobody meaningfully contributes to,
a “community” Slack that is actually a support queue,
and a monetization strategy that competes with your own free tier.
Open-source is not a distribution hack. It is an architectural decision about your product, your business model, and your execution bar.
The wrong one is expensive to reverse.
After building Airbyte into a large open-source data infrastructure company, I’ve been asked dozens of times: Should we go open-source?
Here is the framework I use to answer that question.
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