a single source, nothing corroborates it

Weigh open source against a free tier

Opening the code buys awareness and is close to irreversible: it hides which companies use you and lets a platform vendor wrap your project as their own managed offering. A trial or a free tier gets the same easy access while keeping the growth engine yours.

The method

1. 01

   Weigh the awareness open source buys against the entry it hands a platform vendor, who can wrap any popular open-source project as a managed or enterprise offering.

2. 02

   Choose a free trial or free tier over open-sourcing when the goal is easy access, since open source is close to irreversible, hides which companies use the product and how they use it, and lets other companies build their own growth engine on top of your code.

What it returned

• AWS packaged Elasticsearch as a managed service, whose maker then disclosed that Amazon's pricing limited its own ability to price; Google beat Docker with Kubernetes and then GKE; Confluent changed its license after AWS did the same with Kafka.

• Datadog, Splunk, New Relic and Netlify each reached hundreds of thousands of users without open-sourcing their product.

Sources

• When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the CompetitionGreg Kogan · gkogan.co · Think Twice Before Open-Sourcing · 2019-10-25
• Overview of Product-Led Growth (PLG)Greg Kogan · gkogan.co · Product access · 2020-12-23