AGPL is the strongest open source there is; it makes sure all derivatives of the licensed product that are publicly accessible, even over the net, provide the core freedoms of open source to all users (reading source and modifying it, using it for any purpose).
Thank you so much! I got it written down, and we will check account links separately. I understand about the updates. I heard that regular updates are important for GitHub also, to know which projects are alive and which are dead. Interesting, thanks!
That's all true, but why not put it out there for all to see? This project is useful. People are using it. There are customers with hundreds of users and tens of millions of rows in the database. But the product is not growing fast. What's the point of hiding this code and not putting it out into the open source?
There is a cost to open sourcing. You have to maintain the community. If your goal isn't aligned with that, then you will get upset and probably stop maintaining the community.
Unless you plan to shutter the business, it could harm you more than help to open source if you don't spend the time maintaining the community, which could be a net negative for you.
It's highly unlikely that your userbase will grow or that your product will grow faster if you open source it. So you'll be adding an extra burden and still be in the same place.
Because of money? Once you open source, you can't go back without paying a heavy penalty. Also, you seem to be obsessed with growth. Saas is not an acronym for fast growth.
Open sourcing it will not necessarily give you signficantly more growth but it will give you more work and if it actually any useful, someone will fork it and make a better version then outgrow you
It's simpler — we're not growing as fast as we want. So, for us, the value of the code is not great. I am interested in putting it out in the open and seeing what happens. It would be great if I could gather a community around it and make more people use it. If not, we lose nothing crucial because only fast-growing products interest us.
> I would consider what kind of licensing you want to do, I would also consider goals in doing this. One huge benefit of an open source SaaS offering is the freedom to take control of what you're getting out of it in-house, or going straight to the vendor.
We plan to put both back and front under Apache-2.0. It seems like a good enough way to show that the user won't depend on us.
> Will you be offering migration to and from your SaaS service?
Yes, we plan to continue offering the cloud for those who don't want to deploy their own solution.
> As for building a community, definitely make a Discord and a forum where people can come together and get help publicly, figure out how to get a stackoverflow space for it as well.
We're thinking about Discord right now, even started one. That is an interesting idea about Stackoverflow, thank you we'll think about it!
Are you okay with Amazon taking your code and setting up their own version of SaaS for it? Not saying it'd make financial sense for them, just that… once you open source it they can do what they want.
Also remember that open sourcing something isn't a marketing panacea; you can still struggle to get people interested in it afterwards. It's a useful step if it calms your customers since they don't have to worry as much if you go away, and your value isn't the actual software but support around it or something along those lines.
Yes, I understand the risk, but I really care about trying something new and risky and getting more users rather than running a slow-growing business. If Amazon steals it from me tomorrow, I think I will celebrate for a week :-)
I'll add to the MarkinK's reply: the idea is that CRM/ERP target audience:
* Requires a considerable amount of integrations, customizations, and other "stuff on top";
* Has huge fears about vendor lock-ins and the possibility of unforeseen migrations/support costs.
So yes, the idea is that allowing not only custom deployments, but competitor SaaS businesses built on top of it can raise the market for the added services. Whether that would really work this way or not is a question we'd be dying to know the answer for :D
You can deploy it to Heroku with just one click.
The bot handles text, voice, and photo messages, converting them to text for processing via OpenAI's ChatGPT.
It also uses PostgreSQL for data storage and optionally integrates with Pinecone for long-term memory.
The repository includes Docker and Docker Compose support for easy deployment.
Feel free to check it out, and let me know your thoughts!