Company
Open source is a distribution strategy
Publishing the code was the easy half. Maintaining it in public is the part with a cost line.
Priya Raman
Nadia Osman
We open-sourced four libraries in eighteen months. Two found users, one found a maintainer, and one taught us what an issue tracker costs.
The pitch for open sourcing internal tools is always distribution: people find the library, then they find you. That part worked, roughly on the timeline we expected.
The bill
What we underestimated was the support surface. A library with real users has a real issue tracker, and an unanswered issue is worse marketing than no library at all.
