A number of people have asked me in the past week why Buttondown isn't open-source, given:
- the love and overt financial commitment we have to open source
- the increasing number of "open source startups" (Cal, Maybe, Lago coming to mind)
I preface this answer with the fact that this is coming from my personal blog and not Buttondown's blog, and maybe a year from now either my philosophy or my math has changed on the matter, but the answer right now is something like the following:
- To be open source in a meaningful sense, the process of working on Buttondown would have to change pretty drastically.
- The number of users who benefit from Buttondown being open source is fairly small.
- The theoretical increased rate at which the product could improve is not particularly high. [1]
- I think running a company (even an idiosyncratic one) is a fairly distinct skillset and bag of incentives from open source maintainership, and as bad as I am at the former I think I'd be even worse at the latter.
I write the above in pencil, not pen — I think points one and three could very well change in the future. But right now I think the vast majority of startups who "go open source" do so more as a marketing tactic than as a genuine belief in open source, and I think the best way for Buttondown to "be open source" is to open source components (e.g.) and contribute financially to the software on which it relies.
I find it instructive to look at Posthog's commit history. ↩︎
