Open sourcing a commercial site [closed]

Question

I am building a 'software as a service' website that will be charging users a small monthly fee. I am considering changing the Github repository over from Private to Public. Essentially open sourcing it. Is this suicide? I would like the community to be able to benefit from the code. It is unlikely that I will accept any push request so I'm not going to gain anything in that regard. It is community based, so I think most of the value would be lost by someone self hosting it. It is for a very niche audience so I doubt someone else will start a competing hosting. I would really like the code to be in the open, but not at the expense of my idea of course. How does everyone else feel about this? What is common practice?

Conclusion, I'm keeping it closed for the time being. I may look to open source sometime after launch however.

Answer 1

Since you are not going to accept pushes you might as well hold on get your code stable and then publish it for others to learn and benefit from. You are still building the service, so its not going to attract too many eyeballs either.

From a business point of you, you might want to have a reasonable community around your service before you opensource it. if you are still budding who knows if its taken up by a stronger competitor. If your idea is patented its a different story.

Answer 2

To be honest, and this is not likely going to be a popular answer, but to myself, I would keep it closed for a period of time.

The reasons for this are simple, establish your foothold in the marketplace, build your userbase, your brand, then it gives you a mechanism to market your product further by selectively or completely open sourcing components of your system.