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What goal are you trying to achieve?
I don't know when this trend or became common acceptance but its puzzling to me: Open sourcing for the sake of generating buzz in hopes of more sales ? Isn't by open sourcing you remove that option to pay you? What would somebody do with 38k lines of code that captures tech debt/esoteric workflows?
It's not clear to me why you want to open source. Is your hope that your product is so good people will install it and run it for themselves? As others have said, I doubt you'll get anyone interested in writing code. It's a niche product in a less popular language, and you'd need to get people using the product who can code. Not a lot of people who use CRM/ERP also code. What goal are you trying to achieve?
1. Link everything together. If I'm on your github it should be obvious how I can get to your discord/slack/website/forum and vice versa, don't make me work for it.
2. Build a regular rhythm to your comms/emails etc. If people opt-in to hearing from you, you need to hold up your end of the deal and commit to regular, quality updates. This will become the heartbeat of the community.
3. Pick 1 or 2 'brand' assets. Try to make them distinct, and then use them consistently everywhere. Your logo is probably a good one, but some kind of color combination/sound/flair should be distinctively you. Use these assets everywhere so that it becomes a visual shortcut in people's brains.
Ultimately, keep it simple, and just start. Don't overthink everything, you can always pivot and change as you move forward.
But the most important thing is, by reading your current mood with the project, open sourcing it will give your integrators the possibility of continuing using it when you totally stop caring about it.
It's not clear to me why you want to open source. Is your hope that your product is so good people will install it and run it for themselves? As others have said, I doubt you'll get anyone interested in writing code. It's a niche product in a less popular language, and you'd need to get people using the product who can code. Not a lot of people who use CRM/ERP also code. What goal are you trying to achieve?
That's all true, but why not put it out there for all to see? This project is useful. People are using it. There are customers with hundreds of users and tens of millions of rows in the database. But the product is not growing fast. What's the point of hiding this code and not putting it out into the open source?
Unless you plan to shutter the business, it could harm you more than help to open source if you don't spend the time maintaining the community, which could be a net negative for you.
It's highly unlikely that your userbase will grow or that your product will grow faster if you open source it. So you'll be adding an extra burden and still be in the same place.
I would definitely focus more than anything on figuring out what kind of license you want to do. For example AGPL is probably the most sensible if you want to force anyone making back-end changes to share them back, but it also puts off people like me, who avoid that license like the plague, but when something is AGPL and I only care about using it as-is, that's perfectly fine. The caveat there being you could dual-l…
> I would consider what kind of licensing you want to do, I would also consider goals in doing this. One huge benefit of an open source SaaS offering is the freedom to take control of what you're getting out of it in-house, or going straight to the vendor. We plan to put both back and front under Apache-2.0. It seems like a good enough way to show that the user won't depend on us. > Will you be offering migration to…
Also remember that open sourcing something isn't a marketing panacea; you can still struggle to get people interested in it afterwards. It's a useful step if it calms your customers since they don't have to worry as much if you go away, and your value isn't the actual software but support around it or something along those lines.
I don't have any experience building an open-source community, but I do have a lot of experience in marketing. With that context, here's some thoughts – hopefully they're helpful, if they're not, I guess you can just ignore them. 1. Link everything together. If I'm on your github it should be obvious how I can get to your discord/slack/website/forum and vice versa, don't make me work for it. 2. Build a regular rhythm…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I would consider what kind of licensing you want to do, I would also consider goals in doing this. One huge benefit of an open source SaaS offering is the freedom to take control of what you're getting out of it in-house, or going straight to the vendor. We plan to put both back and front under Apache-2.0. It seems like a good enough way to show that the user won't depend on us. > Will you be offering migration to…
Are you okay with Amazon taking your code and setting up their own version of SaaS for it? Not saying it'd make financial sense for them, just that… once you open source it they can do what they want. Also remember that open sourcing something isn't a marketing panacea; you can still struggle to get people interested in it afterwards. It's a useful step if it calms your customers since they don't have to worry as muc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's all true, but why not put it out there for all to see? This project is useful. People are using it. There are customers with hundreds of users and tens of millions of rows in the database. But the product is not growing fast. What's the point of hiding this code and not putting it out into the open source?
There is a cost to open sourcing. You have to maintain the community. If your goal isn't aligned with that, then you will get upset and probably stop maintaining the community. Unless you plan to shutter the business, it could harm you more than help to open source if you don't spend the time maintaining the community, which could be a net negative for you. It's highly unlikely that your userbase will grow or that yo…