[bartozone]

I worked for an open source company about 4 years ago. It was quite popular, venture backed, and had all the interest in the world. We launched with a lot of fanfare, and adoption was quite strong. We raised a series B just before our official launch and had the backing of great investors. The problem with open source isn't that someone else is going to come and take your code and use it to compete against you. It's that it's nearly impossible to monetize something that you give away for free otherwise.

We experimented with a lot of different business models, but the reality was ... no engineer was willing to pay us for something like "analytics" ... or "hosting" ... They were just going to keep using the code.

It's also incredibly difficult to track actual usage. There was no way to enforce the use of it on our CDN, so people were likely using our product, and we didn't know about it at all. When you open source, you just give up a lot of control. When you're end user are engineers, they won't pay unless it's something they can't do themselves, or aren't already using another service.

If you look at a company like SugarCRM (open source CRM product), businesses will pay. Granted, they aren't salesforce, but they have a legitimate business model that works for them. So while it can work, before making a decision, I would talk to your customers about what they would be willing to pay for, and how much.