The recent post on Supabase (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319901), an open source equivalent of Firebase got me wondering what other proprietary / SaaS solutions there are that should have an open source equivalent?
I don't think things should be open source just for the sake of it. Because open source means different challenges:
- who work on it?
- on which time? Personal free time?
- will it be sustainable in the long term?
- is a company supporting it?
- will the company support it in the long term?
And so on...<p>We can see many open source successful projects supported by a community of volunteers. But also lots of open source projects which were supported by companies but are nearly abandoned.<p>My opinion is that companies should open source most of their software and dedicate employees time to open source projects. There are multiple benefits:
- employees learn to work in public, and reach high level of code and documentation quality
- employees improve their soft skills
- company get free developer relations marketing (something like this)
...<p>So I wish all products were open sourced :)<p>(By the way I open sourced my API mocking tool some years ago (<a href="https://mockoon.com" rel="nofollow">https://mockoon.com</a>) and it has been the best decision of my developer life)