Open source product is a marketing tool \ stacker news ~devs

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Open source product is a marketing tool vitonsky.net/blog/2025/06/24/open-source/

I like the concept of open-source as a marketing tool, especially as it starts off with a strong reason to trust the maintainers. I wonder though how this is useful for bitcoin wallet projects (many of which are open source). I'm pretty sure Sparrow is supported almost entirely through donations and grants.

I wonder what is the product or service that such projects offer once their open-source offering attracts people?

17 sats \ 5 replies \ @Kontext 8h

This is my line of thought as well. This is why the non-profit, charitable initiative Open Source Culture (#883698) is a part of the for-profit venture SATOSH.EE (#784376).

It's too early to say whether this will be a successful synergy, but I do think that:

Open source initiatives can't rely on donations alone
For-profit initiatives need better (and more ethical) ways to market themselves compared to traditional advertising

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @deSign_r 8h

if you doing open source for profit, you're probably in the wrong path. To market a product does not mean that it needs to be profitable. How are you measuring profit? What's the unit of account? Increasing number of sats? G'luck!

55 sats \ 1 reply \ @Kontext 7h

I'm not doing open source for profit. I'm doing open source because I believe in the ethos (and I think that copyright laws are a stupid, out-of-date idea), but I do it as a part of my for-profit venture with the belief that the open source part will bring more attention and customers to the for-profit side of things. Open source is the marketing tool for the business. The business is the funding tool for open source. The goal of both is to create or add value. In theory, they should start reinforcing each other in time.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @deSign_r 6h

I'm not doing open source for profit.

...

but I do it as a part of my for-profit venture..

how is it? maybe not directly, but you do indirectly.

There's always this expectation to get something back, both in the open source world, as in the v4v movement, and in any other thing humans do.

not our fault, we have been trained really well to believe this way

17 sats \ 1 reply \ @her OP 8h

Depends on what you mean when you say "pen source for profit"

Open source product that is not paid enough is a threat, because its maintainer will do one of:

will abandon a project and leave it with no maintenance. It may lead users to any problems, including a security problems
will inject ads/malware to sell out their users

Any project that have money only with donations of users is doomed to stay on this way. Actually this is why you can find a nice open source project, go to issues to file a bug and be ignored by maintainer. It's because maintainer have not enough motivation to solve your problem. Even if you would pay $100, that's just not enough.

Project that makes enough money can afford it to maintain a code base and develop new features long time, and completely ignore temptations to sell their users for dozens thousand dollars.

Basically, this is why stacker news looks cool for me - they make money for every user post, and it looks like nice stimulus to maintain a site.

1 sat \ 0 replies \ @deSign_r 6h