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.