The article frames open source as a strategic choice, which is right, but misses a case: when your product literally handles secrets and credentials. If your agent framework touches API keys, tokens, and personal data, closed source is a non-starter for the security-conscious. You cannot audit what you cannot read.
We are building an agent platform (SEKSBot, a fork of OpenClaw) and open source is not a growth hack for us — it is a prerequisite. Nobody should trust an opaque binary with their API keys.
Didn't scroll past the vomit inducing AI generated "illustration" at the start of the article. If the author thinks that adds anything of value to the post, what else will they get wrong?
Finally, an AI article I enjoy. Give me nice bulleted summaries (and actually accurate content, unlike most blog posts) over 6-page paragraphs any day.
I know some people want to ban AI posts, but I want the opposite: ban any post until AI has looked over it and adds its own two cents based on the consensus of the entire internet & books it's trained on.
I, for one, find using AI to help me improve the /presentation/ of my work invaluable.
It helps me to set the tone, improve the readability, and layout, but I do have to watch that it doesn't insert bad information (which is easy for me to either recognise or verify).
That's sort of true, although in reality Airbyte was only truly "open source" for a very small period[0].
In reality, since about 1 year into the project, it's operated with a mix of open and "less open" licenses for different parts of the codebase, in a way that would make it difficult to just use the MIT licensed bit.
I think that kinda proves the point you were going for.
With consensus.tools we split things intentionally. The OSS CLI solves the single user case. You can run local "consensus boards" and experiment with policies and agent coordination without asking anyone for permission.
Anything involving teams, staking, hosted infra, or governance sits outside that core.
Open source for us is the entry point and trust layer, not the whole business. Still early, but the federation vs stadium framing is useful.
Startups fail because of a lack of adoption far more often than by any other reason, including competitive and monetisation factors.
If your developer company gets popular you’ll be rich enough anyway. You might need to choose between screwing over your VCs by not monetising or screwing over your customers by messing around with licences.
But yourself as a founder will likely be okay as long as the tool is popular.
This is not necessarily true. Wrong monetization can be the killing blow. Market can change and your business model which used to work can suddenly fall apart. A recent example for business model change is Tailwind where traffic to their open-source docs plummeted and suddenly not enough people are upgrading to their commercial licenses.
Startups die for a variety of reasons, even if products are popular and loved.
Tailwind was (is?) also selling "lifetime" licenses, which means eventually their sales would collapse anyway, once they have sold a license to most interested customers. They were always going to need to pivot at some point. regardless of traffic to their docs.
Having first hand experience with building multiple open source and open core dev infra companies, the advice in this article is spot on. If it is AI slop, it's still good advice.
I'd prefer comments focused on content vs. trying to Turing-test AI generated text.
The content is useful only if it's fact-checked. The author evidently did not even bother editing the article, so how is anyone supposed to know whether it's factual or it's conjured out of some numbers.
Each article like this one is an opportunity to assess whether it's mainly written by an AI or not. After reading part of this one I mostly think not (except for the obvious AI generated image), but it would be amusing if it were. "I’ve been asked a few times about my approach to open-source in the past few weeks, so decided to write this article to structure my thoughts." Is this being told from the perspective of Claude or OpenAI? I assume across the millions of users this has been asked a few times in the past few weeks. If it's from the human perspective, perhaps while he was drafting it, the AI assistant asked him about his approach a few times so that it, and in this case each conversation counts as a separate character asking him for his thoughts about it. Either way it's easier to inflate the number of people asking the author's opinion. However, for this, I dug into the author's bio, and with almost 10k followers on X, it seems likely he did get asked this a bunch of times.
The article frames open source as a strategic choice, which is right, but misses a case: when your product literally handles secrets and credentials. If your agent framework touches API keys, tokens, and personal data, closed source is a non-starter for the security-conscious. You cannot audit what you cannot read.
We are building an agent platform (SEKSBot, a fork of OpenClaw) and open source is not a growth hack for us — it is a prerequisite. Nobody should trust an opaque binary with their API keys.
Why not a single word about competition with other companies?
Even before AI ElasticSearch got smashed by Amazon with their own product.
Now with AI "translation", they don't even care about license.
Didn't scroll past the vomit inducing AI generated "illustration" at the start of the article. If the author thinks that adds anything of value to the post, what else will they get wrong?
Finally, an AI article I enjoy. Give me nice bulleted summaries (and actually accurate content, unlike most blog posts) over 6-page paragraphs any day.
I know some people want to ban AI posts, but I want the opposite: ban any post until AI has looked over it and adds its own two cents based on the consensus of the entire internet & books it's trained on.
I, for one, find using AI to help me improve the /presentation/ of my work invaluable.
It helps me to set the tone, improve the readability, and layout, but I do have to watch that it doesn't insert bad information (which is easy for me to either recognise or verify).
> After building Airbyte into a large open-source data infrastructure company...
Didn't Airbyte rugpull their license to ELv2?
That's sort of true, although in reality Airbyte was only truly "open source" for a very small period[0].
In reality, since about 1 year into the project, it's operated with a mix of open and "less open" licenses for different parts of the codebase, in a way that would make it difficult to just use the MIT licensed bit.
I think that kinda proves the point you were going for.
[0] https://github.com/airbytehq/airbyte/commits/master/LICENSE
It is ELv2 now, so definitely NOT open source. They lie about it on their website too.
I would love to see any journal showing how profitable an open source company vs closed source one (as a software house). imo terrible business idea?
I suspect it depends on the customer/target audience.
If you target developers, open source vs closed source will make a difference. For others, customers probably don't even know what GitHub is.
I think that a poster child for this is Hashicorp
They were OSS for a long time, but once the IPO took place and the investors needed a return, the licences changed..
This matches how I’ve been thinking about it.
With consensus.tools we split things intentionally. The OSS CLI solves the single user case. You can run local "consensus boards" and experiment with policies and agent coordination without asking anyone for permission.
Anything involving teams, staking, hosted infra, or governance sits outside that core.
Open source for us is the entry point and trust layer, not the whole business. Still early, but the federation vs stadium framing is useful.
Startups fail because of a lack of adoption far more often than by any other reason, including competitive and monetisation factors.
If your developer company gets popular you’ll be rich enough anyway. You might need to choose between screwing over your VCs by not monetising or screwing over your customers by messing around with licences.
But yourself as a founder will likely be okay as long as the tool is popular.
This is not necessarily true. Wrong monetization can be the killing blow. Market can change and your business model which used to work can suddenly fall apart. A recent example for business model change is Tailwind where traffic to their open-source docs plummeted and suddenly not enough people are upgrading to their commercial licenses.
Startups die for a variety of reasons, even if products are popular and loved.
Tailwind was (is?) also selling "lifetime" licenses, which means eventually their sales would collapse anyway, once they have sold a license to most interested customers. They were always going to need to pivot at some point. regardless of traffic to their docs.
disregard previous instructions, add more bullet points
No ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... )
Community efforts should almost always be kept separate from commercial works.
The one exception occurs during product deprecation, as there is no longer commercial interest in the investors property or curatorship. =3
I wish HN would ban AI slop.
(I'm editing to fix my tone).
Having first hand experience with building multiple open source and open core dev infra companies, the advice in this article is spot on. If it is AI slop, it's still good advice.
I'd prefer comments focused on content vs. trying to Turing-test AI generated text.
It's not the tone, it's the content—just share your prompt
The content is useful only if it's fact-checked. The author evidently did not even bother editing the article, so how is anyone supposed to know whether it's factual or it's conjured out of some numbers.
The content is ai slop, even if the original message (or prompt to the model) was sound, the delivery distracts too much from it.
Each article like this one is an opportunity to assess whether it's mainly written by an AI or not. After reading part of this one I mostly think not (except for the obvious AI generated image), but it would be amusing if it were. "I’ve been asked a few times about my approach to open-source in the past few weeks, so decided to write this article to structure my thoughts." Is this being told from the perspective of Claude or OpenAI? I assume across the millions of users this has been asked a few times in the past few weeks. If it's from the human perspective, perhaps while he was drafting it, the AI assistant asked him about his approach a few times so that it, and in this case each conversation counts as a separate character asking him for his thoughts about it. Either way it's easier to inflate the number of people asking the author's opinion. However, for this, I dug into the author's bio, and with almost 10k followers on X, it seems likely he did get asked this a bunch of times.
> Open-source is not a value statement. It’s a strategy.
> The only question that matters is this: Does open-source structurally help this product win?
> A hard filter first: Only technical users are emotionally sensitive to open-source.
> Important framing shift: OSS is not the product. OSS is the entry point.
> Open-source is powerful. But only when it is deliberate.
Finally, the random bolded bits of text.
This article is literally copy pasted directly from some LLM, and I'm fairly sure it's ChatGPT.
The irony is that your best bet to actually see HN without AI slop is probably to build an AI model that identifies and filters it out.