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Discussion on: I'm Joseph Jacks, founder of OSS Capital, ask me anything!

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Amadeo

Hi Joseph!

Do you work with many companies that are not yet COSS, but intend to open-source their software? I feel like the discussions involved in making a company COSS from the beginning are different from the discussions about transitioning into making their existing products open source.

I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on the differences between the two situations, and if you have any tips on how to more effectively dissolve friction from people who are feeling like they'll lose existing value if the code is made open-source?

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Joseph Jacks

I have spoken with a large number of founders who have or are or might be seriously considering evolving into COSS from an existing proprietary company.

The primary considerations/drivers for this are:

  • renewed growth: adoption/marketing/use
  • re-architecture of the product: looking to completely redesign the system and engage developer contribution to drive greater extensibility, plugins, integrations around the newly open core
  • desire to create a new standard: open source serves as a huge propellant to technology standardization
  • change the game: in markets dominated by closed and proprietary/slow moving IP, open source can be extremely disruptive

In almost all these cases, if you think about the tradeoffs long enough in a given context, open source of a core technology becomes quite compelling.