Open Source, a relic, a charity or still the thing?

A friend asked me recently whether there is any sense in doing Open Source now. My answer was the same as always. I see three options.

1. You get money out of it. 2. You’re dogfooding it in your work projects. 3. You have fun doing it.

If none of that is true, it makes no sense and never did. Best if there’s a combination of 1 or 2 with 3. And at least one of those options is a bare minimum.

Doing OSS is mostly for fun; success stories of single people who succeeded financially through it are rare. Personally, even though some of my projects got wide adoption, I always struggled to make money from them to justify the effort. Unfortunately, OSS creators don’t get enough respect for their effort; with GenAI, that’s even lower. And I don’t think that’s good for the industry long-term, but that’s, in my opinion, the reality.

So my advice would be to think about whether:

1. Your project has commercial potential. 2. It can be turned into a product. 3. There are people willing to pay for that.

If yes, go closed-source and productise it. You can always open it later or make the source available to customers.…