Should you open source your product?
I got asked quite often whether SimpleLogin is open-source. This question seems to be a natural follow-up of the question “why should I trust SimpleLogin?”
I prefer asking the counter-question: do you use Github or LastPass? And are they open-source?
I understand that open-source is a great argument to show there’s no “backdoor” in the product. For projects like Docker or Ansible that are built up from the community, open-source is the way to go. As a matter of fact, we are actually working on making SimpleLogin open-source. (Yeah it takes more than just toggling a Github repository to “public” for a project to be open-source). But please find below the main reasons why SimpleLogin is not open-source yet:
1. Finding the product-market fit should be the top priority
Most startups fail because they cannot find the product-market fit. To find the market fit, a startup needs to be able to experiment with ideas quickly. Sometimes, it doesn’t even have time to create proper documentation. Someone will raise their eyebrows hearing that. But there’s no such thing as a “good code documents itself” or the opposite, “If It Isn’t Documented, It Doesn’t Exist”. The optimal point is usually at the middle and startup tends to lean towards the former.
2. Building a great open-source project requires more than code.
Gone is the time where a great project becomes trending on Github overnight. Nowadays an open-source project even needs some advertising/marketing tactics to succeed. This distraction is fatal to startups. They should spend their time iterating over the product instead of coming to all meet-ups, conferences.
3. Not everyone wants to share their knowledge
When a project is open-source, the author expects to have constructive feedback. Whereas the reality is usually more nuanced. A competitor could copy the key part, a code that the author has spent countless nights for 3 months to make it work. Patenting doesn’t really work in the software world and by the time a patent passes, the right timing has gone as well.
Open-sourcing a product should definitively be the norm. But a project needs to have a clear goal, needs to find its product-market fit first.
