This week on the Business of Open Source, I spoke with David Höck, co-founder of Vendure. We talked about switching licenses from MIT to GPL, the ways that Vendure is different from it’s competitors and how architectural decisions can be a powerful differentiator for an open source company.

Favorite quote: “You need to build your product together with your clients.”

Some specifics we talked about that you should pay attention to:

Why they switched to GPL in order to encourage more people to reach out to them and get more visibility into who was using their open source project
On the other hand, they wanted to make sure that big companies building commercial platforms on top of Vendure’s platform are forced to pay for a commercial license.
They also wanted to choose a less-permissive license, but something that was still well-known and wouldn’t cause a lot of confusion among users or potential customers
The difference between being happy with people using your software for free, and being happy with competitors using your software to build a competitive product, without offering any support to the underlying software.
Do your customers care about whether you are VC-backed or bootstrapped? We had an interesting conversation about this, because Vendure is bootstrapped. I think we settled on a real important nugget — if your technology is really critical to the company, they will care about your long-term sustainability. Being bootstrapped can help convince potential customers that you are independent and will be sustainable for the long term.
The top advantage of open source, David says, is the ability to get fast product feedback from a community. —> I just was talking with someone yesterday about this advantage of an open source strategy, I think it is under-discussed but extremely important.

If you’re the founder of an open source company struggling with your product strategy — uncertain how to differentiate between project or product or how to differentiate the entire company in the ecosystem; don’t know what your project is supposed to do for your business; aren’t clear on the target market for your project or product — you might want to work with me. Find out more here.

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