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14 Comments

Did you open source parts of your projects?

If so, share it. 🤗
What are the pros? Cons? Can it be part of marketing?

Background:
I am thinking of open sourcing a very simplistic, but powerful queue worker in .NET Core that persists queued items in a database. Of course, using a queuing system Like rabbitmq will be more scalable but - as the name suggests - probably only on a scale that is not very relevant for most projects. What is relevant though is keeping your infrastructure as simple as possible. So if you can omit another moving part like SQS or RabbitMQ, it's a good thing.

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    I'm working on a new open source product (https://github.com/eweron/trilla now in the WIP) I have made similar products several times. Perhaps this will help someone not to waste time and use a ready-made solution.

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    I've released 3rd party integrations as open source packages in my former SaaS. This allowed customers to help us improve the plugins, which is a big benefit.
    Next to that I've also released plenty of other smaller libraries at the time, many of which aren't used anymore or never picked up popularity, but have always helped me with job opportunities.

    Right now I'm working on a new product (https://saas-ui.dev) and I've released part of it open source as well. (https://github.com/saas-js/saas-ui)

    I believe there is a lot of value in Open Source, it opens the door for collaboration and builds trust. My ultimate goal is to be able to focus most of my dev time on Open Source tools and helping other developers succeed with their projects.

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      Releasing integrations to 3rd party is very good idea. Might do this as well for my upcoming app All Quiet.

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    I have open-sourced some parts of the code I am using in side projects:

    Planning to open-source some more soon, but mainly just utility functions that can become helpful. For past projects I was seeing a rise in backlinks when linking the projects in the README, which is a good effect.

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    I'm running a self-hosted, but paid, headless cms software. Not too many reasons to open-source it. We, as developers, open source everything, so it just became a default when deciding whether to open-source a project or not.

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      I also think that open sourcing the whole product would feel weird. Although I doubt that there is a REAL risk of someone "copying" your product and actually running. If you had access to say Instagram's source - would you actually want / be able to run it? :D And I think the same applies to much smaller products as well. Anyway I won't open source my whole project either, but thinking of releasing small parts of it that ca be easily reused in a differnt context.

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    I'm running two completely open-source and self-hostable projects: Fugu, which is a privacy-focused product analytics tool, and Mapzy, a store finder.

    Why open-source? Open-source runs the world, and without it we wouldn't be anywhere near where we are today. I personally use a lot of open-source projects, and always prefer them over their closed-source alternatives.

    While working on my projects, I've also realized that the fact that anybody can view your code acts as a check - it forces me to write better code.

    Here are the GitHub links:

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    So we have this SaaS flow platform that allows devs to write a function and connect APIs of different apps. It is a bit like Zapier but you can do more customization by coding. The runtime that the functions run in is totally open source.

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      What is the url of the platform?

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    I absolutely did! I think it's important to give back to the open source community that has helped me so much over the years. I've released a few open source projects on GitHub, and I'm always looking for ways to contribute to others' projects as well.

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      Cool. Which part of Vidon?

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        We haven't opened source any part of Vidon at the moment, it was mostly from my previous company. But we may release our AI avatar generator as an open source project.

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