Why Open Source?
I'm building <a href="https://www.datasette.cloud/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.datasette.cloud/</a> and <a href="https://datasette.io/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://datasette.io/</a> almost entirely open source for a number of commercial reasons.<p>1. I want organizations (initially newsrooms that care about data journalism, but rapidly growing beyond that) to be able to trust the product. The default result of 95% of startups is to go out of business, and going all-in on a product that then blinks out of existence is bad! When I'm selecting a vendor this is a thing I always consider, so I'd like my customers to feel confident that they have the ultimate escape hatch - run it yourself - should they ever need it.<p>2. Newsrooms in particular have learned this lesson before, many times over - and not just for startups. Remember Google Fusion Tables? <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fusion_Tables" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fusion_Tables</a> That's just one relatively recent example.<p>3. Datasette is an ecosystem play. There are over 100 plugins already - <a href="https://datasette.io/plugins" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://datasette.io/plugins</a> - and I hope for there to be thousands more. Developers don't invest nearly as heavily in building and releasing plugins for closed-source platforms.<p>4. Open source is a way for me to punch _way_ above my weight. I can have a much larger impact on the world by participating in open source, compared to if everything I'd been building had been closed.